For the past five years or so has been work on Intel DRM "Fastboot" support and it's looking like this feature may finally be re-enabled by default.

Intel's "i915" DRM driver fastboot mode is intended for eliminating unnecessary mode-set operations during the system's boot process. This "fast and loose mode-setting" is particularly beneficial for Intel laptops/ultrabooks.

With current kernel versions, i915.fastboot=1 needs to be set for enabling the Fastboot mode as it's been disabled by default.

With a new patch they are looking to enable Fastboot by default as a previous test failure with Fastboot was since resolved. This patch is too late for DRM-Next for Linux 4.15, but perhaps we'll finally see it flipped on for Linux 4.16.