Improve Linux Kernel General Performance

Note - work item assignments are currently provisional and may change.

Work items:
[thomas-ab] Study of power management techniques available in SoC architectures (including Samsung, TI OMAP, TI Davinci, ST-Ericsson, Freescale and others): TODO
[thomas-ab] Study of power management techniques defined by JEDEC standards for memory devices (DDR, DDR2, DDR3, LPDDR, mDDR): TODO
[thomas-ab] Short study of Linux VM code: TODO
[thomas-ab] Review and study of initial patch that will be submitted by IBM Engineers who are working on memory regions feature: TODO
[thomas-ab] Test the initial patch on memory regions developed by IBM on all available platforms (Exynos4, OMAP, U8500, imx51, others as available): TODO
[thomas-ab] Implement any additional features required to fully and efficiently support memory regions on all available platforms: TODO
[thomas-ab] Study of initial behaviour of memory regions support and identify suitable policies required to be developed that will efficiently perform the memory compaction/copy: TODO
[thomas-ab] Analyze whether copy of memory pages undermine the benefits of creating memory regions: TODO
[thomas-ab] Collect data about improvements in power saving when using memory regions: TODO
[thomas-ab] Analyze whether this mechanism is ideal for large contiguous memory allocations as required by multimedia drivers: TODO
[dsaxena-linaro] Get presentation slides on wiki and put link here: TODO
[dave-martin-arm] Investigate powerpc and s390 implementation for lazy FPU switching, find out if we can avoid improve the ARM VFP case: TODO
[r64343] Investigate whether mapping the SOC timer registers into userspace can work across different SOC families (OMAP, i.mx, Samsung, Davinci, etc): TODO
[r64343] Investigate if timer rate will change as CPU freq is changed: TODO
[dave-martin-arm] to find someone to do A15 implementation (likely Marc Zyngier): TODO