All of these things sound nice, and I'm sure they'll be a big win for PHP, but I would like to know more about this native driver and why it was deemed better t

All of these things sound nice, and I'm sure they'll be a big win for PHP, but I would like to know more about this native driver and why it was deemed better to fork/rewrite than to contribute those changes to libmysql. From an operations or test perspective this just exploded a three test case matrix (libmysql + {mysql,mysqli,pdo}) to a six case matrix ({libmysql,mysqlnd} x {mysql,mysqli,pdo}). As these two libraries mature and evolve it may be possible to arrive at a situation where certain applications can't co-reside on the same machine, which could be a real problem in a shared hosting environment.