While LLVM LLD and Mold are two popular linkers on Linux systems with the latter being known for its impressive speed and much faster than GNU LD and Gold, this past week Qualcomm open-sourced a new linker: ELD.

ELD is a new linker open-sourced by Qualcomm focused on the needs of embedded developers. ELD is derived from mclinker and tailored for ELF files and the needs of embedded systems/developers. ELD can pair nicely with LLVM-based toolchains.

Qualcomm's ELD only targets AArch32, AArch64, the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, and RISC-V architectures with x86/x86_64 being out of scope.

Those wanting to learn more about the ELD linker can do so via the Qualcomm blog and the code is under a BSD 3-clause license on GitHub .