They really don't make bad machines for routers and dialin lines. We have
two 386s with just a network card and some modems acting as dialin
terminals.
But I really see no reason to have 386 support (and I'd say drop math
emulation too so that people can use FP in the kernel) in the 2.1.x and
later kernels. None of the new features are really worth implementing on
such old hardware. Is anyone really going to have an IPv6 modem pool? And
if you're doing IPv6 routing wouldn't you want a 486 anyways?
-Rob H.