AIUI there is a package called "binutils-gold", if this is installed the default linkerSomething I didn't expect - it seems the toolchain in sid armhf is already configured to use gold by default using symlinks. I've done a gold build, now running with ld.bfd for comparison
will be ld.gold, if it's not installed the default linker will be ld.bfd The actual linkers are both in package binutils.