ld: memory exhausted

[Marco van de Voort]

I'm trying to link a lang/fpc program, and ld bombs out with
"ld: Memory exhausted" when it reaches my physical memory limit. Worse,
it bombed when only one third of the .a's were loaded.

I tried to link with the most optimal deadcode elimination, by simply
creating a smartlinkable compilation unit per symbol and it seems
that ld needs about 100-120x the binary size in memory, which is
a bit steep. (so binary =1 MB, ld uses about 100-150 MB) 

The binary I'm trying to generate is about 8 MB. (lazarus.freepascal.org,
a port recently requested on -ports that I'm looking into)

Does some binutils wizard know how to put a break on this behaviour, (e.g.
by custom building binutils, it's no problem if that slows down ld) ?