[nbsande]

Keeping support for near 20 year old consumer grade machines in the kernel seems ridiculous to me. Doing so would bloat the size of the kernel even more than it already is. The more code you have the easier it is for bugs and vulnerabilities to creep in. When people write articles about moving old computers to windows to Linux they generally don't mean 20 year machines. You wouldn't even be able to run a modern browser with 256 mb of ram

[Tepix]

Most of the hardware specific code is in loadable kernel modules, they increase the code size but not the system requirements.

[colejohnson66]

Yes, but those modules need to be maintained as the kernel is updated. If a specific architecture’s tree is abandoned, it would make sense to remove it from the tree until someone picks it up again.