Well I stole the title from this looog thread. The gist is, sometimes Xorg gets completely frozen up due to unknown bug in Nvidia Linux driver and the only way to fix is a reboot.
For me, every time this happened I was browsing some web page using Chrome, so very naturally I got to blame Chrome, which led me to this Stack Exchange question. But after looking into the details, I believe I am experiencing the same issue reported in Nvidia forum.
I tried to reproduce it as folk saying setting both lower and higher clock to 300, but I couldn’t do it within a reasonable amount of time and load.
This seems to be a complicated issue that could be due to a combination of Nvidia card, driver (I have xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-450 450.66-0ubuntu0.20.04.1 at the time of writing) and AMD chipset. The workaround described in the thread is to set a relatively high lower boundary of the clock.
I created a systemd service:
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$ cat /etc/systemd/system/set-nvidia-clock.service
[Unit]
Description=Set Nvidia clock
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/home/honnix/bin/set-nvidia-clock
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
With the content:
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$ nvidia-smi -pm 1
$ nvidia-smi -lgc 1000,1725 # I have GeForce GTX 1650 super
The drawback is very clear, that this consumes more energy. But still better than having to reboot my computer and losing stuff. I will be monitoring that thread and hopefully it will be fixed.