yan

TLDR: fixed by removing nomodeset in syslinux.cfg

I dived into the .plg file and I saw better what's going on. The first check of lspci -nn | grep -E "VGA compatible controller|Display controller" | grep "Intel" [...]
worked fine and returned the device address (a780).

From System Devices info:

<td title="00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake-S GT1 [UHD Graphics 770] (rev 04) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) DeviceName: Onboard - Video Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] Device 7e06 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 255, IOMMU group 0 Memory at 71000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M] Memory at 80000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M] I/O ports at 4000 [size=64] Expansion ROM at 000c0000 [virtual] [disabled] [size=128K] Capabilities: [40] Vendor Specific Information: Len=0c &lt;?&gt; Capabilities: [70] Express Root Complex Integrated Endpoint, IntMsgNum 0 Capabilities: [ac] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable+ 64bit- Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [100] Process Address Space ID (PASID) Capabilities: [200] Address Translation Service (ATS) Capabilities: [300] Page Request Interface (PRI) Capabilities: [320] Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) Kernel modules: i915, xe ">[8086:a780] 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake-S GT1 [UHD Graphics 770] (rev 04)</td>But it's the subsequent modprobe i915 that kept failing. No blacklisted items, no more vfio bind were present.

I suspect the nomodeset was there from earlier when I was trying to passthrough the graphics card to a VM.

Anyway loading i915 is not my end goal but at least I have /dev/dri that I can now map to docker container.

Turns out the solution was found here, even though my issue did not start with an update anywhere close to 6.12.0 (i was on 6.12.10 for several months).