The issue seems to be caused with the recent NVidia drivers, which will
crash if OptiX context is created prior to the OpenGL context on Linux.
This happens with drivers 545.29.06, 550.54.14, 550.67 and kernel 6.8
on Ubuntu 24.04, and also happens with NVidia driver 550.67 on Gentoo.
While it does seem the issue is likely on the driver side, the timeline
for it being resolved there is unknown. Until then it is possible to
apply workaround on Blender side, which will initialize GPU context
prior to rendering with an external render engine when it is known the
GPU context will be needed later on.
Note this is not a complex fix, because in general it's still possible to
render a frame without and then with grease pencil, in which case OptiX
will still be initialized first. But we don't want to always initialize
OpenGL, and we can't predict future operations.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/120026
598819049e