A GPU reset used to mean the whole GNOME desktop session crashing or freezing, no way back. This GSoC wrap-up covers the recovery mechanism I built for Mutter to survive one: what now restores automatically, a handful of gnarly bugs along the way, and what's still left to finish.
Five weeks into GSoC 2026, here's where things stand in implementing GPU reset recovery in Mutter. When a reset invalidates the GPU context and memory, Mutter currently has no way to recover: the desktop just freezes or crashes. This post walks through the recovery cycle, restoring the graphics pipeline, propagating the reset through the compositor, and the trickier bits like recovering the glyph cache.