intel integrated graphics driver not enabled?

[dbaker]

Recently I posted this thread about my inability to use the nvidia graphics card in my machine and resulting lack of brightness controls and wake-from-sleep functionality: https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...ness-and-sleep
(At present, when I click on the battery icon in the system tray, it says "no screen or keyboard brightness controls available").

I've just realised I've probably been barking up the wrong tree this whole time. I began to smell a rat when I remembered that my older laptop (which was a custom linux one, so worked perfectly straight out of the box, unlike my current dual-booted HP) uses only intel integrated graphics and works just fine, including the brightness and sleeping. Also, it seemed strange that integrated graphics wouldn't provide such basic functionality.

So I decided to look into what was going on with my integrated graphics instead of chasing down nvidia issues. I have an Intel i7 SkyLake processor with whatever integrated graphics comes with that (lspci just says "Intel Corporation Skylake Integrated Graphics").
I ran

lspci -vnn

first on my current machine, then on my old one which works fine with the integrated graphics.
There is only one significant difference in the output: on my old machine, which has an i5 CPU ("Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller") it says "Kernel driver in use: i915", which according to the Intel Graphics for Linux forums (https://01.org/linuxgraphics/forum) means the necessary intel driver is installed and being used. On my current machine, there is no "kernel driver in use" line - only this:

Kernel modules: i915_bpo

I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds a lot like my machine is not actually using the i915 driver, which might explain why integrated graphics isn't providing power management etc (I guess it's falling back to some default driver with very limited capabilities?)

I've taken a number of steps to try to get the correct intel driver installed and working, but haven't had any success so far. In part it's because I don't actually know what to install. In case it helped, I installed the SkyLake firmware on this page: https://01.org/linuxgraphics/intel-l...hics-firmwares
I also downloaded the update tool from here and ran it: https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloa...inux-os-v2.0.2
The latter seemed to fail due to missing packages/unverified signatures/the sort of thing apt will happily skip over but Intel's update tool apparently won't.
However, before that failure, the tool produced this interesting output:

Checking if Intel graphics card available...
  • checking for i915 module in /sys/module
  • i915 module found

So it looks like the i915 module EXISTS, it just isn't being used?!
Should I try to manually enable it somehow?
Have I completely misunderstood the lack of a "kernel driver in use" line in the lspci output?

This is so frustrating.

[claydoh]

If you are able to get a usable high resolution, then you probably are using the included intel video driver. A fail-safe generic driver would keep you at 800x600 or some low resolution I think

The lspci command shows you hardware

The lsmod will show you what kernel modules (drivers) are loaded


Here is mine:

jake@jake-Latitude-E6420:~$ lsmod | grep i915
i915                 1208320  16
i2c_algo_bit           16384  1 i915
drm_kms_helper        147456  1 i915
drm                   364544  18 i915,drm_kms_helper
[B][COLOR="#000080"]video[/COLOR][/B]                  40960  3 [B][COLOR="#000080"]i915[/COLOR][/B],dell_wmi,dell_laptop

or:

jake@jake-Latitude-E6420:~$ lsmod | grep video
uvcvideo               90112  0
videobuf2_vmalloc      16384  1 uvcvideo
videobuf2_memops       16384  1 videobuf2_vmalloc
videobuf2_v4l2         28672  1 uvcvideo
videobuf2_core         36864  2 uvcvideo,videobuf2_v4l2
v4l2_common            16384  1 videobuf2_v4l2
videodev              176128  4 uvcvideo,v4l2_common,videobuf2_core,videobuf2_v4l2
media                  24576  2 uvcvideo,videodev
[B][COLOR="#000080"]video[/COLOR][/B]                  40960  3 [B][COLOR="#000080"]i915[/COLOR][/B],dell_wmi,dell_laptop

Yours should look similar.

It is worth noting that the intel graphics update tool may see updates on their website, but that does not mean that there are actual driver updates,

[dbaker]

Thanks, here is the output of lsmod:


The video driver IS i915 by the looks of it - just like yours. Does it list the drivers in order of preference or something? I'm not sure how to interpret the rest of the stuff on that line. Or, indeed, the rest of the stuff mentioning i915 in the lsmod output.

Do you think the difference in the lspci output between the laptop that works and the one that doesn't is significant at all?

[claydoh]

lspci lists specific hardware IDs present, drivers are irrelevant to it.
The differences in the lspci output between two different machines is because they contain different hardware.
The listing of lsmod does not matter, really. We are just looking to see if the video driver is loaded.

The problem with sleep and screen brightness is a power management problem as opposed to a video driver one, I think.

[dbaker]

isn't power management related to the video driver though? this whole thing started because I googled the problems I was having with brightness/sleeping and found that people had solved it by fixing their graphics drivers...

[dbaker]

I "solved" this problem....by installing a different OS...
see this post: https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post393624

[acheron]

I "solved" this problem....by installing a different OS...
see this post: https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post393624

Neon dev edition now defaults to NOT using the Intel DDX at all, and uses modesetting instead.