Egbert Eich is a long time X developer, SuSE X maintainer, and X.org board member. He also managed the X.org 6.7.0 release.
The PCI subsystem is one of the pieces of X that are in urgent need of renovation. The majority of its code was developed in the early days of PCI and when X mostly supported x86 systems. Since then numerous systems with additional requirements have been introduced and the support provided by the operating systems has been greatly enhanced.
Therefore it is time to redesign this entire subsystem. Some ideas behind this redesign are presented here.
The talk was renamed to:
The X.Org DDX has met its limits. A lot of functionality it provides is not required by most operating systems any more today. It imposes limits and restricitions of hardware of the mid-90's. Furthermore it doesn't provide a lot of infrastructure that is needed for modern hardware. Thus a lot of this is now implemented inside the drivers - and designed in an ad hoc fashion.
The Slides of the talk.