a bug (or misbehaviour) in GNU ld

[Alexei Khlebnikov]

Hello, GNU team.

I can't link very big shared library or executable. The (whole) size of object
files is 94 Mb, I have 128 Mb memory, 192 Mb swap and 200 Mb of free disk space.
When I try to link it, the linker exits with the message "final link failed:
memory exhausted". My /etc/security/limits.conf contains these lines:
=====
*               hard    data            100000
*               hard    rss             100000
*               hard    stack           100000
*               hard    as              100000
=====
As you see, memory limit is nearly 100Mb. Disk quotas are not used.

I think that the linker should use disk space when it hasn't enough memory, as,
for example, GCC compiler does.

The program "top" shows that ld's memory usage reaches 70 Mb before the crash.
I've tried "--no-keep-memory" switch with no success. After many unsuccessful
attempts I've tried "--strip-debug" switch and got a shared library of 8 Mb. But
I've lost debugging possibility. :(  Note that the windows version of the
library links and debugs well.

I use Debian GNU/Linux on Intel Pentium II (i686), ld version is 2.11.92.0.5
20011005.

Is it ever planned to implement disk usage if the memory is not enough? Or I
didn't find the possibility (I read the man)?

Regards,
Alexei.