And not just that, Android also severely lags behind upgrading its mainline kernels, so you can't even avoid the issues by upstreaming your drivers. You have to fork them. People get mad at vendors that they don't upstream their drivers but there is currently zero benefit in that. Google should reward vendors for that, and maybe we'll start seeing more drivers upstream.
That is just Google reinventing a stable kernel API for certain drivers. It will be Android specific and will never be mainlined. Drivers that use this will probably not be part of mainline either. It is just Google splitting of from vanilla Linux and going their own way, what they want is to be able to use 5 year old drivers on new kernels.
