William: Regarding the issue with efifb not working without the patch I
supplied, it seems the information efifb requires normally either comes from
the bootloader, or else the kernel can discover the information itself if
booted using the EFI stub or EFI handover protocol. The failure to work on your
system without the quirk could be due to either a bug in the EFI firmware or a
problem with how the kernel is being booted.

Do you have working graphics in your bootloader? If so the problem is probably
with how the kernel is booted. Are you using the standard Ubuntu boot setup
(i.e. grub2), and are you modifying it in any way?