A general question on framebuffers

[Bob Alexander <bob@ngi.it>]

After having tamed the horrible ACPI power drain while sleeping, mostly 
patching quite a few things in the radeonfb code I discovered that the 
bootsplash code will currently work with another framebuffer (vesafb 
16bit color).

My questions are:

1) what are the advantages of an hw specific framebuffer such as 
radeonfb as opposed to a more generic vesafb ?

2) Other than embellishing my boot screen with penguins and their 
brethrens what other benefits come from using a framebuffer ?

3) Is is likely that if I stop using framebuffers altogether the ACPI 
sleep will have less problems and therefore could use kernels with less 
patches ?

Thank you,
Bob