Comment 3 for bug 1655584

I was able to stop the loop by blacklisting the nvidia modules and restarting the system.
I added /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-kill.conf, deliberately chose to appear after the existing nvivida conf files in the same directory (not sure if that's essential):

blacklist nvidia_367
blacklist nvidia_367_uvm
blacklist nvidia_367_modeset
blacklist nvidia_367_drm

alias nvidia off
alias nvidia-uvm off
alias nvidia-modeset off
alias nvidia-drm off

This was all guesswork; I don't know how much is essential.