Keeping the fires burning

When 386 support was slated for removal, so too was support for 387 math coprocessor emulation, required by 486SX chips (which lacked the floating point unit of their DX brethren). This was granted a reprieve, since it didn’t really complicate other subsystems like the 386 code did, and there was some hardware still in production that required math emulation. That feature is still around today, so you can see that code is only dropped from the kernel when there is good reason. Just being old is not enough.

Unfortunately kernel support is far from the end of the story. Distros are free to choose the optimisations to build into their packages, and since there’s not a great deal of 20-year-old