Michael Opdenacker reported:

For backward compatibility with earlier (< 2.6.24) kernels,
arch/i386/boot/bzImage or arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage symbolic links to
arch/x86/boot/bzImage are created when you build an x86 kernel. The
arch/i386 or arch/x86_64 directories are then created for this only
purpose.

Issue: these generated directories and symbolic links are *not cleaned
up* when you run "make mrproper" (and thus "make distclean"). This
disturbs the production of patches, because the source tree is left with
generated files and directories.

Sam has an alternative fix:

The directory is killed during make clean as opposed to make mrproper.
Reported-by: Michael Opdenacker <michael-lists@free-electrons.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>