[$] Two performance-oriented patches: epoll and NUMA balancing

The search for better performance from the kernel never ends. Recentlythere has been a stream of smaller patches that promise incrementalperformance gains, at least for some types of applications. Read on for anoverview of two of those patches, which make changes to the epoll systemcalls and to NUMA balancing. This work shows where developers are lookingfor performance improvements - and that not everybody measures performancethe same way.