As a small but interesting addition coming for this quarter’s Mesa 26.1 release is making it easy to simulate a GPU reset with the LLVMpipe software driver. While seemingly mundane, this can be quite handy for compositor developers and other app/software developers wanting to more easily test how their code behaves when encountering a GPU reset.
Wayland developer Robert Mader added support to LLVMpipe for being able to simulate a GPU reset. LLVMpipe provides a CPU-based a software OpenGL implementation and typically wouldn’t need any “GPU reset” but this code path makes it easy to provide a hardware independent path for testing.
Setting the LP_CONTEXT_RESET_FILE environment variable to an arbitrary file location and then writing to that file location via touch or other external process will in turn cause LLVMpipe to trigger an emulated GPU reset.
An easy, hardware-independent, and straight-forward way to now trigger a GPU reset if wanting to test how your Wayland compositor or other software copes with a GPU reset.
This merge landed the LLVMpipe feature for Mesa 26.1 due out later this quarter.