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GUI apps stop working until next boot after some system upgrades

My system occasionally has an issue that looks like this:

* I run `pacman -Syu`
* Many things get updated
* Many GUI apps (including all display managers and Xorg) start refusing to run and throw up OpenGL errors, if I try to restart the display manager I get stuck in TTY with no GUI
* At next reboot the problem goes away

I poked around and found some errors mentioning Nvidia and NVRM. I tried to reload the Nvidia kernel modules and that failed. I analyzed the error messages, and I'm pretty that what's happening is this:

* System upgrade installs new versions of kernel modules, deletes old ones
* New version is only compatible with new kernel
* That's okay, system upgrade installed the new kernel version as well, and even ran mkinitcpio via pacman hooks
* But the old kernel is *still running in memory*, and it's not compatible with the new kernel modules, therefore it's not able to load them - and rebooting fixes this by booting me into the new kernel

I'm not 100% sure but it sounds plausible. However, it is  annoying to have to reboot after the system upgrade. On the other hand, the situation seems hopeless because how can I reload the kernel without a reboot?

Is there anything I can do here, or is this basically Nvidia devs creating a situation where rebooting is mandatory after a system upgrade that touches drivers?