I had written in previous postings, that I had replaced the ‘Nouveau’ graphics-drivers, that are open-source, with proprietary ‘nVidia’ drivers, that offer more capabilities, on the computer which I name ‘Plato’. In this previous posting, I described a bug that had developed between these recent graphics-drivers, and ‘xscreensaver’.
Well there is more, that can go wrong between the CPU and the GPU of a computer, if the computer is operating a considerable GPU.
When applications set up ‘rendering pipelines’ – aka contexts – they are loading data-structures as well as register-values, onto the graphics card and onto its graphics memory. Well, if the application, that would according to older standards only have resided in system memory, either crashes, or gets forcibly closed using a ‘kill -9′ instruction, then the kernel and the graphics driver will fail to clean up, whatever data-structures it had set up on the graphics card.
The ideal behavior would be, that if an application crashes, the kernel not only clean up whatever resources it was using in system memory, and within the O/S, but also, belonging to graphics memory. And for all I know, the programmers of the open-source drivers under Linux may have made this a top priority. But apparently, nVidia did not.
And so a scenario which can take place, is that the user needs to kill a hung application that was making heavy use of the graphics card, and that afterward, the state of the graphics card is corrupted, so that for example, ‘OpenCL‘ kernels will no longer run on it correctly.