After going through the kernel mxcfb driver source and trying a bunch of different options (including the values used by eips captured with strace), nothing works, so I guess we are back to
system("eips ''"); like in the earlier demos (at least that still works, and it is fast too).
It looks like the only "portable" (and reliable) method of doing eink updates is to call eips ''.
I am right back where I was the first few times I tried to get ioctl() updates working, except this time they WERE working.