In time for the holidays and the forthcoming release of X Server 1.6 next month, a horde of X.Org driver updates were released. David Airlie has announced new versions of xf86-video-trident, xf86-video-apm, xf86-video-ast, xf86-video-chips, xf86-video-glint, xf86-video-neomagic, xf86-video-sis, xf86-video-tseng, xf86-video-tdfx, xf86-video-s3, xf86-video-ark, and xf86-video-s3virge...
KMS needs memory management as well, so there is a fair amount of work required. My guess is that the drivers which are being actively worked on (generally the ones where new GPUs are being added) will pick up KMS eventually, but the rest will probably stay with user modesetting. Only a guess though...
Would it be possible to implement a vesa KMS driver?
That way we (well... the devs) wouldn't need to spend/waste that much time on _properly_ using the memory manager and implementing the actual KMS code.
Well, I'm not a proponent of 15 year old graphics chips anyways, so I guess I can't really argue about their situation