If you're feeling like hacking on the VM, I imagine there is a good project (or >1) in locality on NUMA machines; and every 2-socket i386 machine these days is a NUMA machine.
Work that might include memory on one node caching memory on remote NUMA nodes. Or some form of affinity of processes for NUMA nodes holding their own memory. Or even something as cute as migrating a process's data when it is moved off of one NUMA node onto another when all the CPUs in a node are spun down. -- vs
