The screen of death - slang for a screen that appears when the operating system crashes. A roll of the death of the screen is required to restart the computer, any unsaved work is lost.
Sometimes the internal self-test is triggered in the operating system kernel - "this should not be." This means that the kernel or the drivers are working in emergency mode, and the problem is solved only reboot. Microcontroller device operating without human intervention really reboot without prompting. But personal computers are usually equipped with a monitor and allow relatively unskilled person (user or system administrator) to replace parts of equipment or software. To hint about the cause of the error, the operating system displays any details related to it. For example: what is the self-test fails, a kernel module is executed, the stack was the condition ... Typically, this information is displayed in text mode or single-color background.
For devices that the user can not serve (players, mobile phones, game consoles ...) "screen of death" can be called a screen saver that occurs when the broken device.
Causes of abnormal behavior of the operating system [citation needed | edit wiki text]
Serious damage hardware. In particular, if a failure occurs in any driver is likely to be a problem with the device, which is responsible for the driver. Unsystematic screens of different types in different modules are usually talking about the faulty RAM.
Overheating CPU or memory.
A mistake by the driver, the kernel module.
Poorly written malware that has penetrated into the zero ring of protection.
Random hardware failure arising, for example, in case of problems with power supply.
Fault-volatile memory device in which the OS is stored. For example, a corrupted file system.