well this is pretty nice.  running ircii's ./configure is a lot
faster with the new code:

new kernel:
83237938031309.550u 92461310068164.803s 0:28.50 67838.5%        0+0k 0+1436io 0pf+0w
33002042136535.277u 106789018431374.091s 0:28.57 -13779.-2%     0+0k 0+1431io 0pf+0w
42734957104100.925u 107298561362087.311s 0:28.44 62481.5%       0+0k 0+1433io 0pf+0w

	avg: 28.50333


old kernel:
58289991296791.441u 58289991296796.057s 0:30.56 62146.2%        0+0k 0+1442io 0pf+0w
68348128581554.723u 86794872655268.156s 0:30.76 -50788.-9%      0+0k 0+1444io 0pf+0w
86770646162110.897u 160557622456954.400s 0:32.60 -47769.-8%     0+0k 0+1454io 0pf+0w
66715724399920.535u 75939096436782.171s 0:31.62 -57905.-4%      0+0k 0+1448io 0pf+0w

	avg: 31.385

that's about 9% faster...


i also notice that the number of io's slightly decreased as well.
there are no pagefaults etc, because i was running it completely
cached (ie, these are all 2nd or beyond runs of the test), in an
mfs /tmp...


.mrg.