I915ovmfrom - Upd

sudo dmesg -T | grep -i "i915ovmfrom"
sudo dmesg -T | grep -i "overlay\|ovm"

UPD can stand for:

In many bug reports (e.g., Launchpad #1948372 for Ubuntu 22.04), users report:

[ 342.456211] i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm:i915_gem_execbuffer2] i915ovmfrom upd: fence wait error -16 i915ovmfrom upd

Here, -16 is EBUSY or -ETIMEDOUT. The driver waited for the GPU to finish an overlay update, but the hardware never responded.

Action: Capture the full context:

cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/error > gpu_error_state.log

Search for HANG and correlate with the last i915ovmfrom upd line.

In the Linux kernel’s drm/i915 subsystem, "overlay" refers to a hardware overlay plane—a separate display pipeline that can scan out video frames without compositing. The ovm abbreviation has been spotted in the intel_overlay.c source code. sudo dmesg -T | grep -i "i915ovmfrom" sudo

Furthermore, in virtualization stacks like QEMU/KVM with VFIO-mdev (mediated device), an overlay VM may be used to intercept GPU commands. The from upd part then indicates a command coming from an update ring buffer.

Conclusion: i915ovmfrom upd almost certainly refers to an update request originating from an overlay memory management unit to the i915 driver. UPD can stand for:

Inside the VM or container, force LLVMpipe:

export GALLIUM_DRIVER=llvmpipe
export MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.3

Or in QEMU:

-display sdl,gl=off -vga std