current toolchain on Alpha is crap?

[Bob Tracy <rct@gherkin.frus.com>]

Well, maybe the subject line is a bit over the top, but there's either
an element of truth to it, or the kernel developers have seriously
screwed things up in a fundamental way for kernels on Alpha after 4.9.

Both my 4.10 and recent 4.11-rc5 builds fail to boot/run properly.  The
console spews an endless stream of "unix: Unknown relocation: 1" errors
on each attempt to load any module.  I think I saw several messages to
the effect of "exec unknown format" as well.

Here's the current toolchain info:

gcc version 6.3.0 20170321 (Debian 6.3.0-11)
GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.28

Rebooting on 4.9 restores things to a sane state.

Is anyone else "out there" having better luck?  I'll probably end up
having to recreate the 4.9 tree and build it with the current toolchain
to eliminate the tools as the cause of what I'm seeing.  That being
said, a kernel build on the PWS-433au is an overnight-plus-a-bit-longer
proposition that I'd like to avoid if there's another way to figure out
what's going on.

Thanks.

--Bob