@koteisaev THAT BSOD was caused by a driver crashing, not a driver returning an error code, which is a very different thing because a crash is uncontrolled and cannot be safely handled, while an error code return is a safe and controlled condition.
Linux actually tries to prevent a full system panic, and only terminates the current process if the context is a user process. If you're lucky that means the machine keeps working as normal, if the crash didn't corrupt memory. More often than not, even in that case, the faulty driver had some mutexes locked and your system will slowly deadlock into oblivion as other processes try to lock the same mutex. There is no reasonable way around this. This is why uncontrolled crashes are bad and error returns are not.
@marcan Sounds as argument against big kernel and in favor more isolated drivers, and against "hyper-privileged" software in general...
Kernel could unlock all mutexes on process death (and even if process leaked mutexes lock without crash), same way as file handles freed even if you use kill command on process....
At userspace it resembles how nodejs domains used to intercept error to prevent ungraceful process crash.