gold is faster and a few things (e.g. llvm) have started to require it -- but at the moment, it isn't possible to build everything with gold (e.g. gold can't link glibc, building VirtualBox with gold seems to cause corrupted debug info, ...). Distributions are starting to come up with hacks to make both coexist (e.g. suse seems to have /usr/bin/ld==old ld, /usr/bin/gold==gold, hacked in gcc option to make it use gold on request, using traditional ld by default; we're thinking about /usr/bin/ld==gold, /usr/bin/gnuld==old ld, hacked in gcc option to make it use gnuld on request, using gold by default). To prevent lots of incompatible hacks to make a coexistence of ld and gold possible, one way should be added upstream.
You can try: http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2009-11/msg00035.html I will use it to enable gold in the next Linux binutils.
Looks like there were several patches upstream for this issue but none of them made it upstream. I can see that Fedora added former Roland's patch recently. What's the status here?
Fixed.