They are a record of the process of adding to the Linux kernel. Such background can be used to trace the history of contributions if those contributions turn out to have had malicious intent or were derived from code that came from sources that were not compatible with the GNU license that the kernel is released under.

Just a note: Windows software for controlling hardware is highly likely to assume a)direct access to the hardware (sometimes mediated thorough ancient APIs and assuming the existence of defunct expansion slots) and b) assume meatspace time can be counted using OS timing ticks (which get stretched out as modern VMs timeshare with other processes underneath the virtulized hardware). It is awfully tough to replace them sometimes.