Yeah, we specifically disabled suspend and resume and supplied the needed parameters at boot time when “safe graphics mode” was selected. There were definitely cases where neither vesafb nor vesa worked for us and we resorted to our own basic framebuffer driver with out-of-band management of modes via exposed IOCTLs to bypass X’s logic here altogether.

I know you’re posting from the perspective of a Linux dev, but some of this was on FreeBSD (and some of it was not).

The EFI stuff was all on BSD, which took a lot longer to make that transition than Linux did. I didn’t dig into those as much as I did with the BIOS/VESA stuff as my role in the product was being slowly phased out at the time we added native EFI support but had plenty of devices where customers would resort to using CSM to workaround EFI framebuffer graphics driver issues.