Ever heard of Linaro before? Probably not, but the non-profit software engineering organization specializes in tweaking and optimizing open source code. Linaro’s members include ARM, Texas Instruments, Freescale, Samsung, and ST Ericsson — so it should come as no surprise that they’ve just offered up improvements that can supercharge Google’s Android Open Source Project (AOSP) build of Ice Cream Sandwich.

Linaro engineers have been working away at getting Android to utilize their own modified version of the gcc 4.7 toolchain. Their code has now been posted for the world to re-use, and the results are impressive. A demonstration by Linaro’s Bernhard Rosenkranzer using a pair of TI OMAP 4430-based Pandaboards shows an increase in OxBenchmark performance of 30 to 100% over the stock AOSP.Rosenkranzer notes that the Pandaboard GPU drivers are closed source — even greater gains might be possible if they were allowed to optimize those as well. Even without them, however, Linaro’s improvements are very impressive.

And better still, they’re coming soon to CyanogenMod 9. Those of you who run a copy of the immensely-popular Android remaster and a Samsung Galaxy Nexus can already test drive an unofficial build if you’re feeling adventurous. Based on initial comments about the build’s overall speed and smoothness, you just might want to make the jump.

Those of you who own other phones, however, will have to be patient. As is always the case with CyanogenMod, Linaro’s enhancements will arrive when they’re ready to ship the new code. Don’t ask for an ETA, just take comfort in knowing that your phone or tablet will soon get a major performance boost thanks to some very hard-working open source software engineers.