Aarch64 broken with gcc not supporting --fix-cortex-a53-843419 linker flag

[hgy59]

It seams that rustc since 1.98 has hard coded pre-link-args like this, that breaks building with ld.bfd of gcc 4.9.4

"pre-link-args": {
    "gcc": [
        "-Wl,--fix-cortex-a53-843419"
    ]
}

It is not possible to get rid of this error with -mno-fix-cortex-a53-843419.

This regression comes from #155453

Code

I tried this code:

<code>

I expected to see this happen: regular linking

Instead, this happened: aarch64-unknown-linux-gnueabi/bin/ld.bfd: unrecognized option '--fix-cortex-a53-843419'

Version it worked on

It most recently worked on: 1.97.1

Version with regression

rustc --version --verbose:

1.98

Backtrace

Backtrace

<backtrace>

[nazar-pc]

The last patch to the series GCC 4.9.4 was released more than 10 years ago. It is probably time to upgrade to something from this decade if you want to use the latest Rust toolchain.

[hgy59]

I understand that upgrading GCC/binutils is the recommended solution, and I agree that using a newer toolchain is reasonable.

My concern is rather the compatibility aspect: Rust 1.98 introduces a new linker requirement for an existing target (aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu) that was not present in 1.97.1. For projects maintaining older or vendor-specific cross-compilation toolchains, this is effectively a breaking change.

I would have expected such a change to be associated with a new Rust Edition, or at least to be handled in a way that does not make previously working target/toolchain combinations fail to link after a regular Rust compiler upgrade.

I realize that Rust does not formally guarantee compatibility with arbitrarily old external toolchains, but I wanted to point out that this is a significant change in practice, especially for cross-compilation environments where upgrading the complete vendor toolchain is not always an option.

[nazar-pc]

On your target, you can probably use LLD that Rust ships with instead of binutils

[theofficialgman]

This same bug is causing issues on a Ubuntu 24.04 ARM64 github actions runner.
https://github.com/theofficialgman/nod/actions/runs/35045588345/job/104634582196#step:7:231