To quote him:

“Change the segment limits to 4GB, we set the user accessible bit on all of the kernel address space already. Intel recommend this anyway, because using a non-4GB limit adds an additional clock cycle to address generation. We were able to install 4GB segments into the LDT, so any limits we imposed on %cs and %ds were academic anyway. More importantly, this allows us to make a page in the kernel readable to user applications, for holding things like the signal trampoline and other fun things.”

This change has drastically improved potential performance, and flexibility.