I'm the maintainer of the support for Zaurus, iPAQ and other similar era devices (yeah, I know) in OpenEmbedded. After a while if you want to be able to build an up-to-date user space you need to be able to build an up-to-date kernel, and given that we're only now getting to a reasonable level of support in mainline for some of these devices I would hope that we can expect that support to stay there for a reasonable length of time.