reference to archive member in linker script?

[John Breitenbach <breiten at lexmark dot com>]

Is it possible to specify a archive member with a SECTIONS description 
in a linker script?

For example, I'd like to place a few functions (section(s) of a module) 
together to avoid icache thrashing or to limit the number of
page faults for sequence of function calls, etc.

SECTIONS {
...

 SPECIAL  ALIGN ( 4096) : {
 libc.a(malloc.o .text)
 libc.a(sprintf.o .text)
libz.a(inflate.o .text)
}

.... }

The linked email from Nick Kelsey offered a patch to allow libraries to 
be specified, but using this syntax has the effect
of the library not getting linked in (unresolved symbols), and anyway, 
isn't quite what I'm looking for.  I can
get what I need if I manually extract the needed .o files, and insert 
them into
the appropriate place in my linker script.  I'm just hoping to avoid 
that step.

Thanks, JB

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/binutils/2004-02/msg00040.html