Many peripherals have a mechanism to reset the device, to get it back to a known good state. Generally device drivers will do this when they receive a message they don't understand from the device, or a command sent to the device times out without response.

Here's my graphics chip getting reset:

  [drm:mes_v11_0_submit_pkt_and_poll_completion.constprop.0 [amdgpu]] *ERROR* MES failed to response msg=3
  [drm:amdgpu_mes_unmap_legacy_queue [amdgpu]] *ERROR* failed to unmap legacy queue
  [drm:gfx_v11_0_hw_fini [amdgpu]] *ERROR* failed to halt cp gfx
  amdgpu 0000:c6:00.0: amdgpu: MODE2 reset
  amdgpu 0000:c6:00.0: amdgpu: GPU reset succeeded, trying to resume