Back to the kernel

If you mean the memory management parts, as some have pointed out above there are reasons for that, like OpenCL for example.

> The kernel and X also never access the hardware at the same time. Designing the whole architecture so that the kernel can display an oops message when it crashes is absurd.

It's not just about displaying oops messages. You get other benefits, like no flickering on boot up when X starts. You finally get frame buffers in the kernel that do not conflict with X. You get safe and flicker free switching between virtual terminals and between multiple sessions when several users are logged in on the same machine.

> The thing about handing monitor hot-plug interrupts is also a red herring. For one, you hardly need extremely low latency for that, so polling once every 200ms in user mode would probably be sufficient. Even if you wanted to do it with an interrupt, there is no need for everything else to be in the kernel - handle the interrupt in the kernel and notify user mode.

Unfortunately, there are many chips that blank screens when you poll for outputs.