This is a somewhat obscure condition but I haven't been able to locate a
patch that addresses this, even though it is fixed in the latest
versions.
We build one set of binutils (minus ld and gas, which do not show this
problem) that target x86, but also have powerpc, mips, arm and sh
enabled. If you attempt to use any of the secondary targetting (arm,
sh, ppc, mips) utils on a static library it will very quickly exhaust
your system memory. It doesn't matter in which order you specify the
targets. If you configure with '--target=powerpc-nto-qnx
--enable-targets="mips-nto-qnx sh-nto-qnx i386-nto-qnx arm-nto-qnx"',
then powerpc is fine and the rest show this behaviour.
I was hoping that maybe someone would have an idea where I could look
for a fix to this.