Hi Slurm team,

while upgrading Slurm 25.05 for FreeBSD, I ran into a linker crash when building several utilities (e.g., sacct, scontrol, sinfo, sprio, squeue) that attempt to embed help.txt and usage.txt using:

ld -r -o "$*.bino" -z noexecstack --format=binary ...
objcopy --rename-section .data=.rodata,...

On FreeBSD, this step consistently crashes lld, the system linker.
To resolve this, I implemented a local workaround in the Ports tree that replaces the binary embedding rule with a portable .S assembler snippet compiled by the C compiler, e.g.:

help.o: help.txt
	$(AM_V_GEN){ \
	  echo '	.section .rodata'; \
	  echo '	.globl _binary_help_txt_start'; \
	  echo '	.globl _binary_help_txt_end'; \
	  echo '_binary_help_txt_start:'; \
	  echo '	.incbin "$(abs_srcdir)/help.txt"'; \
	  echo '_binary_help_txt_end:'; \
	  echo '	.byte 0'; \
	} > $@.S
	$(AM_V_at)$(CC) -c -x assembler-with-cpp -o $@ $@.S && rm -f $@.S

This approach preserves the intended embedded data but avoids direct ld/objcopy usage, allowing all affected utilities to build and link cleanly with FreeBSD’s lld.

I plan to prepare a proper upstream patch that updates Makefile.am accordingly (rather than patching Makefile.in) and submit it for review once finalized.
This issue is primarily to document the problem and track an upstreamable solution.

Environment:
- OS: FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE / 15.0-ALPHA4
- Linker: lld (base system)
- Slurm version: 25.05.x
- Build system: autotools / gmake
- Affected components: utilities embedding help.txt / usage.txt

Impact:
Build failure (linker crash) during Slurm build on FreeBSD when ld --format=binary and objcopy are invoked.

Workaround:
Replaced ld/objcopy embedding with portable .S assembly compiled through $(CC).