Ten or fifteen years ago, I remember trying to run a demo version of Maple V. This version of the app, maybe from 1995, was old enough to be in a.out format. U

Ten or fifteen years ago, I remember trying to run a demo version of Maple V. This version of the app, maybe from 1995, was old enough to be in a.out format. Unfortunately I struggled to run it, because libc was in ELF format, not a.out. Still, you have a point, the kernel code is not that much because the format is so simple. Arguably removing the code fails Linux's philosophy of not breaking userspace code.