The card that reported zero

After a routine update the bench box booted, the desktop came up, and the card reported 0 MB free and 0 MB total. The model never started. The fan spun like it had a point to make.

I am not writing version numbers as if they were a guide. They belonged to that image and that card, and copying them onto a different machine is how this story starts over. The box in this note is generic on purpose. No name, no address, no sticker from a shop.

What fixed it was boring. One driver branch, matched to the toolkit the runtime wanted, then a full reboot before I touched a model file. A userspace restart was not enough. The process that thought it owned the card was already gone, and the device still was not.

I wrote the working pair, driver branch and toolkit, on a card next to the machine. Sample lab, sample card. The next update will probably ignore the note. That is why the note exists.