Q: Is there any way to get Intel i915 graphics without ACPI? I've got an old tablet PC that panics on boot with ACPI GPE storms. It boots just fine with acpi=off in the kernel arguments, however I've never been able to get the Intel i915 accelerated graphics working (Intel 855GM chipset). 
I have no idea why the two should be related but I've come across a few reports of i915 being dependent on acpi:


*

*The i915 drm module has an indirect dependency on ACPI | Red Hat Bugzilla

*Why Intel i915 driver depends on button module | Debian User Forums
How can I verify this dependency and is there any way to get accelerated graphics with my busted ACPI?

A: There are a couple of things to try in this AskUbuntu Q&A titled: How can I fix broken i915 drivers for Intel GPUs?.
In researching this issue it would appear the answer is no there isn't a way to enable i915 without ACPI.
excerpt

On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 04:42:20PM +0800, Aaron Lu wrote:

According to Matthew Garrett, "Windows 8 leaves backlight control up
    to individual graphics drivers rather than making ACPI calls itself.
    There's plenty of evidence to suggest that the Intel driver for
    Windows [8] doesn't use the ACPI interface, including the fact that
    it's broken on a bunch of machines when the OS claims to support
    Windows 8.  The simplest thing to do appears to be to disable the
    ACPI backlight interface on these systems".
There's a problem with that approach, however, because simply
    avoiding to register the ACPI backlight interface if the firmware
    calls _OSI for Windows 8 may not work in the following situations:
     (1) The ACPI backlight interface actually works on the given system
         and the i915 driver is not loaded (e.g. another graphics driver
         is used).
     (2) The ACPI backlight interface doesn't work on the given system,
         but there is a vendor platform driver that will register its
         own, equally broken, backlight interface if not prevented from
         doing so by the ACPI subsystem.
    Therefore we need to allow the ACPI backlight interface to be
    registered until the i915 driver is loaded which then will unregister
    it if the firmware has called _OSI for Windows 8 (or will register
    the ACPI video driver without backlight support if not already
    present).


So it would seem that the 2 are linked.
