Thanks. I didn't see explanations of the graphics driver restart in those MSDN links, but I found one here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/har

Thanks. I didn't see explanations of the graphics driver restart in those MSDN links, but I found one here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff570087(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff... And third party articles: https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-14/materials/us-14-vanSprundel-Windows-Kernel-Graphics-Driver-Attack-Surface.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-14/materials/us-14-vanSprun... http://bsodtutorials.blogspot.fi/2013/12/timeout-detection-and-recovery-stop.html http://bsodtutorials.blogspot.fi/2013/12/timeout-detection-a... So there's a user-space part to the GPU driver and a kernel-space part, much like on Linux. For the recovery functionality it sounds like the graphics card's kernel-side GPU driver just registers a callback that is used by Windows when it thinks the GPU or driver is stuck, but there aren't any special arrangements to make this robust against the driver corrupting OS state or other hardware. Same kind of mechanism could be implemented in Linux. I'll save those OS X links for later when I have time to look into that one!