News broke in January 2024 that developers were preparing to add a blue screen of death to Linux, and that change has now been made.

The blue screen of death first debuted on Microsoft Windows where it gained notoriety for being painfully unhelpful. Despite that dubious past—or perhaps specifically to make fun of it—Linux devs have decided to co-opt the idea to alert the user when a kernel panic occurs.

Javier Martinez Canillas, a Red Hat and Fedora Linux dev, announced that the change has made its way to Linux (note “DRM panic” refers to “Direct Rendering Manager,” not “Digital Rights Management”).

A “Blue Screen Of Death” on the #BeaglePlay board, using the new DRM panic infrastructure contributed by my awesome colleague Jocelyn Falempe.

— Javier Martinez C. (@[email protected]) | June 15, 2024

The Linux blue screen of death code has been added as of Linux kernel 6.10.