So I have been following gpsdriver's memleak for a few days more and here is what I've found:
gpsdriver leaks no matter if the gps is in use or not, in fact using it didn't seem to have any effect in memory usage; smaps confirms that the leak happens in the heap as expected. It is swappable, and it will swap out causing speed issues when the leak has grown big, only to return shortly afterwards back entirely to resident memory the next time a leak happens, causing more issues by swap trashing when the tablet is in use.
The leak doesn't seem to have a clear pattern in time or size, the vmHWM/vmRSS seems to grow a few KB every few minutes while wmData remains constant, then about every hour, give or take half an hour, vmData/vmHWM/vmRSS will jump anywhere from 132 KB (usually) to a few hundred KB.
I'm going to set ulimit and see what happens.