Silent CUDA Kernel Failures: Why My Error Checking Mechanism Failed Me
Recently, I hit a really frustrating bug: a specific issue that only appeared in Release Mode but vanished in Debug Mode (or any mode with debugging symbols). The program wasn’t crashing loudly, but the kernel outputs were consistently 0. Even worse, my error checking mechanism was completely silent. To catch CUDA kernel launch failures, you typically just need to call cudaGetLastError(); it returns an error code if the launch had an issue. In our case, it returned cudaSuccess. ...