Bingo man! You didn't think I was idle all this time, did you?
I got fed up with qemu and the mega slow romantic way so I switched to a 32-bit Porteus (Slackware to the rescue!) on a 64-bit laptop and voila, no processor left behind!
With CFLAGS (for jemalloc), CXXFLAGS (for llvm) and the modified llvm target pointing to the same processor architecture (pentium2) it all went smoothly in a few hours.
I was then able to build cargo with my generic i686 rustc-1.3.0 and test the whole setup on sokoban-rs which also built and ran without a problem on the target machine. Yipee!
Here's the fruit of my labours: