Normally, a blue screen of death crash (BSOD) in Windows would cause your PC to automatically restart, but programmer NSG650 (via NTDEV) has created a driver that instead makes your PC boot up a Linux emulator. While this driver is more of a novelty than it is actually useful, it’s an ingenious showcase of how to exploit features in software by simply using them in an unintended way.
The way this driver works is actually pretty simple — it just uses the built-in bug check callback feature in Windows. A bug check is just the technical name for a crash or BSOD, and when a bug check happens, Windows wants to know why. As part of the bug check callback routine, drivers can “reset a device to a known state,” per Microsoft’s Windows coding handbook. In other words, it can still run code after a crash.
