Could it be they hope to offload the basic driver support to an open source project, especially with the shift towards DRI/DRM, and they plan to move the proprietary 3d support to a blob attached at the mesa layer? I feel like this would be a positive move overall, even if it's not completely ideal.
That's the model we've ended up with with most of the mobile GPU drivers in Android -- open source kernel side managing resources and queueing and proprietary goop in a library in userspace where it can do limited harm (can't crash the kernel, clobber arbitrary memory, etc). Not as nice as a 100% open driver, but a massive improvement over proprietary binary glop in the kernel.
> Not as nice as a 100% open driver, but a massive improvement over proprietary binary glop in the kernel.
FWIW, the most of the Nvidia proprietary driver works in a user space library too. It would be a really bad idea to make your OpenGL implementation and other high-level facilities running in kernel space.
> I feel like this would be a positive move overall
There is one aspect which really could gain from this: the eventual reduction of the harm from the "3/11 rule" fallout.
If and when Nvidia's hardware works acceptably well out of the box on linux systems, there will be less need for annoyed forum postings and endless "help, please" threads. AFAIK Google weighs recently updated pages more than older ones, so the negative PR hits from badly behaving hardware should fizzle and die out in time.
From a purely personal point of view, a unified DRM/KMS access scheme will be nice with Wayland in mind.
