[PATCH v2 00/16] PR ld/24600: Add general linker support for mapless archives

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Thu, 6 Nov 2025, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:

>  This has been verified across 249 targets, causing no regressions and 
> adding no failures in new tests.  The `cris*-*-*' target failure from v1 
> has now gone, owing to commit c1a7d039587b ("cris: bfd: Default selected 
> target to the configured target"), however I have not investigated a fix 
> for the underlying problem yet (where the default BFD target is always 
> used for mapless archives, which may cause issues with some non-default 
> linker emulations).

 I did investigate such a fix now and in the course of making additional 
testsuite cases tripped over yet another problem where AR silently fails 
to add a symbol map while creating an archive, whether by default or as 
requested with the `s' flag, when invoked for a non-default emulation.  
Interestingly enough `ranlib', which is the same code after all, adds a 
symbol map successfully when subsequently run on said archive.

 I've yet to investigate where this extra issue comes from, however in any 
case I shall be respinning this patch series shortly with extra test cases 
and bug fixes added.  Therefore please hold on your temptation to review 
these changes for the time being.

  Maciej