on Win95 and NT the video layer hits the hardware directly and is kind of
a ring 0 process - like ours.
Possibly it could make better use of irq/dma hooks and stuff - the mode
restore is trivial - its a single notifier hook and some modules that
just load/unload notifier hooked routines to save/restore video mode.
Doing all video via the kernel is bad- the intel CPU's are very slow
when crossing protection and ring boundaries