Ubuntu – Difference between Intel i915_bpo and i915

driversgraphicsintel graphicskernel

I have a Intel i7 6700 Skylake CPU and suffering from constant kernel panic. My best guess is that it is related to the Skylake graphics driver. And also I notice that in Linux kernel 3.19 series, the graphics driver is i915_bpo, while in Linux kernel 4.0+ series, it use i915 driver.

For example, under kernel 4.1.0-040100rc1, the result of sudo lspci -k | grep -EA2 'VGA|3D' is 

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Sky Lake Integrated Graphics (rev 06)
    Subsystem: ASRock Incorporation Device 1912
    Kernel driver in use: i915

While in kernel 3.19.0-28, the result is 

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Sky Lake Integrated Graphics (rev 06)
    Subsystem: ASRock Incorporation Device 1912
    Kernel driver in use: i915_bpo

So, the question is what is the difference between Intel i915_bpo and i915 driver ?

Update

I have tried some 4.3 series kernels, and all of them are not working properly, also, when I use the 4.3 kernel, during the boot, I have this error showing in the screen:

enter image description here

Best Answer

Phoronix has reported some issues with Skylake CPUs and Ubuntu. There are also workarounds available. Nevertheless, The simplest solution for the time being the author has found (and you are probably not going to like this) was to run Fedora instead. At least for the time being...

Regarding i915 vs i915_bpo, I think "bpo" stands for "backported". It contains some fixes found in newer versions of i915 that get backported to ubuntu kernel to fix known issues/add new hardware support.

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