With this commit, we now separate the channel from the buffer. This will
allow us to replace buffers on the fly without touching the channel. Since
nobody is supposed to keep a reference to a buffer anymore, doing so is not
a problem and will also permit some copy-less data manipulation.
Interestingly, these changes have shown a 2% performance increase on some
workloads, probably due to a better cache placement of data.
These functions do not depend on the channel flags anymore thus they're
much better suited to be used on plain buffers. Move them from channel
to buffer.
