The somewhat misplaced os::supports_sse method was added in ancient times to add backwards compatible with Linux kernels older than 2.4, which might not have supported SSE extensions in 32-bit builds. All OS-specific implementations today simply return true except for the linux 32-bit which returns false if the kernel version is less than 2.4. Since 2.2.x and older kernels are long since EOL'd (some source say LTS ended in 2004) it seems about time to remove this check from the OpenJDK mainline.