Back to the kernel

The Xorg DDX driver stuff... that had direct access to memory regions and would twiddle bits on the PCI bus, configure the hardware and things like that. Like you had it, at least partially, configuring the AGP ports and whatnot.

All of this was happenning, more or less, outside of the control of the Linux kernel and it was up to the Linux kernel, when dealing with your console or OpenGL graphics, to do what it can to avoid stepping on your Xserver's toes. If the Linux kernel or Xserver goofed up and had some sort of conflict then it would quite possibly hard lock your machine due to crashing the PC hardware.

It's rare, but a few times I've been using Linux and hte screen has gone all rainbow bright, and the lights started blinking, and the speakers started blaring static. This is not a pleasent experience.

The Xserver.. that's also a lot of code to have running around running as setuid root under your user's control. And besides the security implications involved with that... Depending on the acceleration method used by applications like Firefox you had a more-or-less direct code path from HTML/Javascript code being rendered --> Xserver --> you hardware.

Also X11 is a networking protocol. So when your running your system in the traditional X terminal mode your allowing a program that has direct access to your hardware to have network access.

So ya the Xserver and Xorg's drivers are technically 'userspace' and that is nice, but it's not really something that is hugely better then just shoving _everything_ into the kernel.

By moving the modesetting into the kernel (which is essentially low-level hardware configuration anyways...) and memory management (which Linux is good at and you can leverage the existing code for application virtual memory management) you can eliminate X's requirement to run as root, eliminate direct from your Xserver to your hardware, reduce the complexity and code redundancy in the Xorg drivers, and still have the the OpenGL stack and EXA-related stuff (except for video memory management) all happenning in userspace through a unified kernel interface.