Does this actually happen with enough regularity to care?
In the cases where it does, I imagine it's a situation where you're actually doing 3D-accelerated renders of the user interface. In which case, when the graphics subsystem craps out, hasn't your running system been rendered effectively unusable anyway?
I get that this is a nice idea in theory, but does it actually improve anything practical in practice?
The Linux i915 driver manages to hard freeze my laptop every few days without any 3D games or even a compositing window manager ... It would be lovely to take it out of the kernel and isolate it with IOMMU.
Right, but that's my point. You're playing a game and the display crashes — I guess it's nice in theory that the rest of your system stayed up, but you're still more than likely just going to reboot, no?
If not, how exactly do you plan to restart the graphics process?
Windows automatically restarts the GPU driver after a crash; the screen goes black for a few seconds and then all the windows come back up. It can also upgrade the GPU driver without a reboot. It's not used often but it's pretty handy.
I think that was the moment I realised I liked Windows 7 more than XP. Installed new graphics drivers, expected "you must reboot your system", instead the screen went black (I had a moment of 'oh crap') and then came back up with 'installation complete.' Very impressive if you're used to XP.
This impressed me a lot a couple of months ago, when my GPU driver started crashing about every 5 seconds while playing a game, and Windows kept restarting it, without even killing the game. The performance was abysmal of course, but still pretty neat.
If the OS itself doesn't automatically recover the graphics process, you could always fire up your OS's built-in screen reader and use it like a blind person until you can get the graphics back up and running.
