final edit: You want real logs instead? add this to your kernel command: drm.panic_screen=kmsg
Kinda funny, kinda neat.
I have no idea what the QR-code might reveal (I could not read it from this picture), so I pixelised it just to be sure.
FWIW I know exactly what happened and did not panic. To reproduce, boot your device with init=/bin/sh, then type exit.
CachyOS
The picture above is generated by Drm panic which is part of the kernel itself, or maybe a separate module. The data in the QR code is the kmsg log.
Not systemd, which wasn’t running when that happened.
And it’s been around for years; I guess I haven’t had a kernel panic in a long time.
The QR code contains the panic stack trace text, directly encoded into a URL and a parameter. When you scan it, it goes to the website, which takes the parameter, decodes it and displays it as plain text.
Personally, I think it’s a terrible idea compared to just showing the logs, because now you need internet and a phone with a camera to read a kernel panic log.
Edit: yes, it was Systemd who implemented it.
So it’s leaking information about your system to an external site?
That’s just what we need.
The theory is that the site just hosts a small JS snippet that locally decodes and shows you your logs.
But yeah, now that you mention it, it would be trivial for the site to get and store the logs, and you wouldn’t even notice.