dropped atopmicops workaround for irrelevant Opteron locking bug It's not cheap at all when done in this way (i.e. without runtime patching) and apparently useless. It looks like Linux kernel never got this workaround at all. See bugzilla ticket: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11305 And I see no traces of this workaround in glibc either. On the other hand, opensolaris folks apparently still have it (or something similar, based on comments on linux bugzilla) in their code: https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/32842aabdc7c6f8f0c6140a256cf42cf5404fefb/usr/src/uts/i86pc/os/mp_startup.c#L1136 And affected CPUs (if any) are from year 2008 (that's 6 years now). Plus even if somebody still uses those cpus (which is unlikely), they won't have working kernel and glibc anyways.