For building coreboot v3 on cygwin, these changes (among others that I still clean up) are needed. Otherwise, it doesn't find the symbols in the libraries (ld arguments are parsed right-to-left).
No they're not. Object files are linked left to right; object files in archives are only included if any of their symbols are required. Because of that, in general, libraries should be last on the command line.
Patch looks good though.
Segher