NVidia crashing x server madness

I’ve been having a problem with a newly installed Mint 14 machine. A customer has been having this problem with a Scientific Linux 6.x machine. Some time after lighting up the machine, and usually after using an OpenGL application, the NVidia driver effectively hard locks, dumping error messages like this into the system logs.

[ 5444.863396] NVRM: Xid (0000:85:00): 13, 0003 00000000 00000000 00000ff4 0f000000 00000000
[ 5444.867446] NVRM: Xid (0000:85:00): 9, Channel 00000003 Instance 00000000 Intr 00000010
[ 5444.871429] NVRM: Xid (0000:85:00): 12, Ch 00000003 Cl 00000000 Off 00000ff4 Data 0f000000
[ 5444.877696] NVRM: Xid (0000:85:00): 9, Channel 00000003 Instance 00000000 Intr 00000030
[ 5444.884057] NVRM: Xid (0000:85:00): 12, Ch 00000003 Cl 00000000 Off 00000ff4 Data 0f000000

Its bad enough that it makes the system effectively unusable. But, as I’ve discovered, its not the hardware. Switching to the nouveau drivers (spit), the system is rock solid, but I can’t do GPU work with CUDA. And if you google NVRM: Xid (…, you see this problem is common. Very similar symptoms. And worse than this, this problem goes back a while. No, I haven’t opened a bug yet. I may, but I am not sure that much will come of it. I will see if we can work around this somehow.