Vimage next step

[Julian Elischer]

I've been doing performance testing on the 'non-vimage' 'structified'
case VS the original 'globals' case and have not been able to see any
really significant differences (though I have seen very slight
differences in the distribution of results).

SO I think we are in the position of moving forward to the next steps.

I think that just means checking in the rest of the vimage tree
from what I have seen.

Then  we can play with it a bit and then proceed to the
jail/vimage merge stuff that Jamie (and bz) are working on.

One thing I'd like to do is make the following changes:

1/ evaluate the ordering of teh items in the vimage structures to see 
if there are items that should be clusterred for cache reasons.

2/ remove all sub structures from the vimage structures
and replace them with pointers. This is because puting them in
directly in the vimage structures will make our lives harder due to 
ABI issues. If they are independently allocated (*) then we don't need 
to worry about them changing in size.


(*) actually they could still be allocated as a blob but we would 
access them as if they are separate.

comments?

Julian