On the Mac, the fresh-save route of the docs crashed at about frame 3390 and from about frame 5300 page-faulted or crashed on corrupted pointers, with the encoding thread on and off; issue #101 reports an iPhone 17 freezing on kIOGPUCommandBufferCallbackErrorPageFault.
- tf_draw opened its render encoder while the copy encoder (g_blit) was open: ubd_land's inline updates leave it open, as does a copy or a dispatch just before. Metal validation: "Command buffer already has an open command encoder"; the driver then crashed in -[AGXG18GFamilyComputeContext_mtlnext performEndEncoding] (or its dealloc on the encoding thread). Every other helper pass ends g_blit before it opens its own encoder; tf_draw now does too. A host built from before PR #62 crashed the same way.
- A block-linear image's atomics went to the 64 KB dummy buffer, but SPIRV-Cross indexes them by the image bound in the same slot (spvImage2DAtomicCoord: x + y × its width). Z-A's atomic max into a 480x270 r32ui 2D array (texture ID 302, fragment shader 2bd5037003980716) ran about 1.4 MB past the dummy: into zero-copy pools over the game's heap (pointers in the game's objects and the host's program objects had their upper 4 bytes replaced by packed values, rewritten every frame) and into unmapped addresses (the page fault, after which macOS ignores the process's command buffers). MTL_SHADER_VALIDATION=1, which stops out-of-bounds accesses, let the scene play. Such atomics now go to a scratch buffer at least as large as the image (atom_scratch: width × height × layers × texel size, at least the NVN storage size; 3 MB here), grown when a larger image needs it; the results are discarded as before. An unbound image keeps the 64 KB dummy, since its slot holds the 1x1 dummy image. The bring-up host (d34e044) with today's shaders page-faulted the same way.
Three headless Mac runs of the whole route (encoding thread on, off, on) reached frame 12,300 with no GPU error and no crash; before, every run crashed or page-faulted between frames 5230 and 5480. t_nvn 102/102, t_ub 47/47, t_geometry 95/95, t_vbuf 43/43. docs/agents/04-graphics.md and Z-A's notes in docs/development.md say so.