On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 5:52 AM, Ard Biesheuvel
[off-list ref] wrote:

It turns out that this odd treatment of absolute symbols (i.e.,
symbols having section number SHN_ABS) is a known issue in GNU ld

https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2012-05/msg00019.html

Ugh. I hate the GNU linker. It's slow, it does nasty crazy fixups, and
it's apparently buggy too.

I wonder what happened to gold, and why it didn't take over. I'm
assuming it had _other_ bugs.. Oh well.

                 Linus