After lots of searching and looking at i915 code. Someone on the Arch boards discovered that many early low power intel cpu's have a power management bug that causes the kernel to core in the i915 driver. Later revisions of the same cpu's have that bug corrected.

The cure it to add i915.enable_dc=0 and make sure that you no not have the nomodeset on the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line on /etc/default/grub. The i915 driver does need to do modesets to the kernel.

This fixed the 3 laptops that had the problem with kernel panics. Apparently Windows 10 and 11 have that options as the default as to why they worked and linux failed.

It does cause the battery life to be about 10% shorter due to gpu being at a higher power than needed.