[la_barba]

That writeup does a good job at explaining the current situation, but it doesn't completely refute the validity of the demand. The primary people who are asking for stable driver APIs and ABIs are desktop folks who want to be able to run closed source drivers for their GPU, and other consumer peripherals. Which means its a very limited set of architectures, or maybe just one set of architectures - x86 and x64. The other thing is that linux has a non-modular monolithic kernel design which means that simply having a stable API for GPU drivers isn't enough. you'll probably also need a stable PNP API layer, and a stable IO API Layer, and a stable file system layer, and whatever other OS services a driver would use. The argument about deprecation of interfaces and fixing bugs is valid, but everything is a trade-off in OS design. Linux's implementation of a monolithic design turned out to be very stable, when in-theory, micro kernels have a vastly better design when it comes to stability. Whether theoretical benefits are realized at the ground level, depends on a LOT of factors. Personally, I think the effort required to create a stable API layer would be too enormous to undertake at this point..