Your hardware will probably start acting weird.  Read locore.s and
  grep for DUMMY_NOPS if you want to find out what it does.  Remember,
  you have the source -- Use The Source Luke.

I guess I don't get it.  I did as you suggest, and as far as I can tell,
DUMMY_NOPS doesn't do anything at all except change the definitions of
FASTER_NOP and NOP, which aren't used anywhere.  This is in the 1.1 kernel.
Is this all some kind of elaborate joke?