What's your ld version. I don't remember but some particular versionsCorrect. I'm using binutils version 2.17. This is the current testing branch of gentoo for x86.
of ld will have this problem. These ld versions do some optimizations
and if a section size is zero then linker gets rid of that section and
any symbol defined w.r.t removed section, ld makes that symbol absolute
instead of section relative. That's why you see above warnings.
I had raised this issue on binutils mailing list and they fixed it.
http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2006-09/msg00305.html
I am using following ld version and it works fine for me.
GNU ld version 2.17.50.0.6-2.el5 20061020
So you will have to move to the latest ld version and problem should be
resolved.