https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26891

--- Comment #5 from shirk@bitspin.org 2011-05-17 03:31:16 PDT --- (In reply to comment #4) I assume you're not familiar with mac or didn't read the while bug history. Mac are booted using the EFI runtime one of the successors to BIOS.

What is the real reason that the driver doesn't see the video BIOS? Is it looking at the wrong address? Is some MMU wrongly setup? I mean the video BIOS is obviously there,

You're wrong here. The bios is there if you boot in 'legacy mode'. Legacy mode means your EFI machine will load and run a (slow) BIOS emulation.

if you can extract it with dd.

This exact step happens in legacy mode. If you boot in native EFI you don't have any BIOS at all.

I would rather see the real bug fixed than have a workaround.

As nice as it sounds 'fixing' would imply writing a separate KMS driver which would work entirely without the need to access the BIOS.