A marker or a journal left by a start that died in the boot's builds was always read as a driver crash. Since the
whole warm those builds run for minutes, so a start ended from outside in that time (the task manager, a program that
stops the game, the power) switched the pipeline prebuild off for that driver for good, or put up to 32 variants on
the skip list that the driver had merely been building. Closing the window was already an orderly end and still is.
The crash handler now leaves a note while the boot's builds run. With the note the next start does what it did: it
skips the prebuild, or the variants the journal names. Without it the end is taken for a stopped start: the pipelines
are built again and the journal's variants are blamed on nothing. Three such ends in a row still skip the prebuild,
for a driver that ends the process without a fault the handler sees. The boot's journal has a file of its own, so the
preparation's keeps its meaning.
The whole warm waits prewarm_full_s seconds at most (600): when they are up the game starts, the builders step down
to the background's thread counts and priority, and the file says "done", so the boot screen has one turn per driver.
tests\boot_warm_check.py covers what a leftover marker means with and without the note.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.2 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A start that finds the pipeline cache written by another device or driver has nothing built, and everything was
compiled beside the game: an 8-core integrated GPU drew fewer than 600 frames in its first 11 minutes. Such a start
now waits on the "Preparing shaders" screen, with counts, for every recorded pipeline, for the compute pipelines on
every core at normal priority, and, when a sample says the driver's own cache lacks the prepared stage libraries, for
all of them on every core. The memory gate still holds for the builds, and the library builds write the preparation's
journal while the start waits, so a variant the driver's compiler dies on is skipped from the next start on.
boot-warm-owed.txt beside the caches names the GPU and driver: a start closed during the warm is followed by one that
goes on with it, three at most, and "done" keeps later starts ordinary while the cache file still carries the earlier
driver's header. When the boot stops waiting (prewarm_wait_ms, or a minute without progress) the builders step down
to the background's thread counts and idle priority. prewarm_full = 0 turns the warm off.
With nothing in the driver's cache the probe took 425 s on an RTX 5090 with 16 CPU threads: 87 s for 5,775 recorded
pipelines, 19 s for 4,075 compute pipelines and 317 s for 42,231 prepared variants.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.2 <noreply@anthropic.com>
