Its honestly a REALLY good idea. Still pisses me off that windows has had a QR code for years but it just goes to a generic support page.
That said: There are plenty of environments where a QR code is not viable. Secure environments where you cannot have a camera is one. But also most server rooms where the KVM has been abused for years and is covered in filth. What you can squint and scratch down on a piece of paper and what your phone can process are two very different things.
Linux so easy enough to have both code and text but I do have concerns on the broader impact of this being normalized.
IMO there are exceptionally few cases where it is acceptable for a QR code to not be immediately adjacent to a textual representation of the same content.
and fewer to none of those allow you to submit kmesg and “debug information” to the kernel bug tracker
Agreed.
But take a look at computing and UX in general. There is a reason that a common refrain at the college and entry level job levels is “These kids don’t know what a folder is because they are used to everything at the top level”. And… there are very good reasons to not deal with folders in google drive or whatever. Hell, everyone lamented the loss of the start menu but how many of us still just do “winkey, ‘makemkv’” or whatever to launch something? Which is how you get thought processes that hide that until they are outright gone.
And the same with error messages. Hell, I was in a meeting not too long ago where we had a very serious discussion about whether we should even still emit error data to the console for an application when NOBODY ever thinks to copy and paste that. So what are we gaining when the first day of any support ticket is “Okay… can you get me this file from this folder? Okay, open up explorer and click this box and type c colon slash…”
should even still emit error data to the console
Log it to a text file instead.
If I uderstand it correctly, this feature will be tied to build flags anyway, so server distros can have this turned off in their kernel.
I agree, it’s a great idea. The limitation is that the maximum amount of data a QR code can hold is about 3kB. Assuming the encoded data is compressed - either mostly ASCII and compressed, or a custom serialization format referencing external lookup tables - you could reasonably fit around 10kB of debugging information into a single QR code. That’s not too shabby.
It should say the following in big easy to read letters:
Don’t Panic
So long and thanks for all the fish
So sad it had to come to this
(but you can panic a little bit, as a treat)
“Don’t tell me, tell the damn kernel!”
Seriously though I’m not sure how helpful this screen is. It only is going to happen if there is some serious problem. The first thing a user will do is look up what the screen means.
Putting a funny joke on the screen might make people laugh even though they are likely having a bad time.
I can’t read those messages anyway thanks to my Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses
Neat. Can you display a QR code in a tty?
Yes, couldn’t be easier.
https://github.com/Lenivaya/qrrs
Here’s a tool that already works - and it’s written in Rust!
Too bad the c maintainers will make up mumbo jumbo to not include it
the kernel has parts being rewritten in rust afaik so perhaps there’s less resistance than you think
There’s been a lot of drama with that recently, apparently some of the C devs are making it very hard to get code merged in for rust support, to the point where one of the rust devs is stepping back as a maintainer because of frustrations with some of the C devs
Edit: see this Mastodon post from someone from the Asahi Linux project: https://vt.social/@lina/113045455229442533
Anime penguin girl describing the error using interpretative dance when?
(I was just trying to make a silly joke but it’s not like I don’t want it)I’d really like to see this on a modified kernel tbh.
QR code takes you to:
"This panic brought to you by
NERDZBETZ
Deposit up to $100 and we’ll match your money!
Bet on buffer overflows, segmentation faults, memory leaks, and even traceback memory addresses!
Sign up NOW!"
Shhhh THEY’LL HEAR YOU
I know that picture is a QR code, I can even scan it, but I just can’t stop thinking it’s one of those magic eye pictures.
there are drugs that can make that happen
That’s actually cool
Now I want ASCII QR codes.
This is actually a really good idea. 🙏
this is not a stupid idea
I need that for real life, 😁
