This is an interesting new feature coming soon to X.org and the Linux kernel – it’s basically moving a video card’s mode setting code (which makes the card change resolutions and so on) out of the user-mode video driver, and into the kernel. It probably doesn’t sound exciting, but it will lead to a much nicer user experience. For example, it helps to make the boot process more flicker free, and will make suspend and hibernation much more reliable.
It also makes switching from X to a virtual terminal much, much faster. There are some videos in the article demonstrating it, but since this is not planned for release until the end of the year, it is still fairly buggy and unreliable.
Your right, it does sound boring … at first.
However, it’ll be great when this is finished. No more black screen after suspending and during bootup!