I compiled opencv on an old machine, a Toshiba Portege R100 with a Pentium M processor. When I tried to import cv2 in python2.7 I saw a coredump.
The answer was here (Thank you Miguel)
When I look at CMakeLists.txt I see that there is no test for whether the cpu supports sse3 even though it could have looked in /proc/cpuinfo and seen that my processor supports sse2 but not sse3.
Would it be appropriate to request this? I'm not sufficiently competent in CMake to work out how to add it for myself from the possible solutions such as https://gist.github.com/hideo55/5642892