A small "hello world" program gives an executable of more than 64 kbyte when
linked with shared libraries. With binutils-2.14 the same "hello world" program
gives an executable of about 6 kbyte. 
Looking at the result of the following command:
readelf -a a.out | grep LOAD
shows that the LOAD entries in Program Headers now have an alignment of 0x10000
(64 kbyte)
The same command on an a.out generated with binutils-2.14 shows alignment of
0x1000 (4 kbyte)
The bintutils-2.14.91 also generates big a.out with alignment of 64 kbyte.
This suggests that the alignment value correlates with the a.out size.

Curious: on a.out binaries of X86 the alignment is 0x1000 but the executable
size is less than 4 kbyte (with binutils-2.15, as found on FC3).

For mipsel cross-compilation, I use a cross-compilation toolchain generated with
Dan Kegel's crosstools with the following parameters:
- crosstools-0.38-rc37
- gcc-3.3.3
- glibc-2.3.2
- binutils-2.14, 2.14.91 or 2.15
- linux-2.4.18