ld hangs indefinitely statically linking binutils on ppc64el

The latest util-linux upload, 2.27.1-1ubuntu1, reproducibly fails to build on ppc64el because the build hangs indefinitely:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/util-linux/2.27.1-1ubuntu1/+build/8230106

The hanging command is:

/usr/bin/ld -plugin /usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64le-linux-gnu/5/liblto_plugin.so -plugin-opt=/usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64le-linux-gnu/5/lto-wrapper -plugin-opt=-fresolution=/tmp/cce7J0Br.res -plugin-opt=-pass-through=-lgcc -plugin-opt=-pass-through=-lgcc_s -plugin-opt=-pass-through=-lc -plugin-opt=-pass-through=-lgcc -plugin-opt=-pass-through=-lgcc_s --sysroot=/ --build-id --eh-frame-hdr -m elf64lppc --hash-style=gnu --as-needed -dynamic-linker /lib64/ld64.so.2 -z relro -o test_fdisk_ask /usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64le-linux-gnu/5/../../../powerpc64le-linux-gnu/crt1.o /usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64le-linux-gnu/5/../../../powerpc64le-linux-gnu/crti.o /usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64le-linux-gnu/5/crtbegin.o -L/usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64le-linux-gnu/5 -L/usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64le-linux-gnu/5/../../../powerpc64le-linux-gnu -L/usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64le-linux-gnu/5/../../../../lib -L/lib/powerpc64le-linux-gnu -L/lib/../lib -L/usr/lib/powerpc64le-linux-gnu -L/usr/lib/../lib -L/usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64le-linux-gnu/5/../../.. libfdisk/src/test_fdisk_ask-ask.o ./.libs/libfdisk.a /home/ubuntu/util-linux-2.27.1/.libs/libblkid.a /home/ubuntu/util-linux-2.27.1/.libs/libuuid.a -lgcc --as-needed -lgcc_s --no-as-needed -lc -lgcc --as-needed -lgcc_s --no-as-needed /usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64le-linux-gnu/5/crtend.o /usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64le-linux-gnu/5/../../../powerpc64le-linux-gnu/crtn.o

strace shows it repeatedly calling brk(), so presumably trying to allocate more memory in very small increments.

It doesn't appear to be lto-related. The symptom is reproducible when calling gcc with -fno-lto.

I do not yet have a useful backtrace from ld for this, because for some reason recent versions of binutils are not getting dbgsym packages in the archive.