YOU may not care about old crappy systems, but you'd be surprised how much cruft is still in use in large organisations. And I for one am glad GNU went through

YOU may not care about old crappy systems, but you'd be surprised how much cruft is still in use in large organisations. And I for one am glad GNU went through all the trouble to make their code work on non-standard environments, because it means that I can use GNU stuff to bootstrap a non-crufty userland on those systems. About the LTO stuff: Maybe you did it wrong? I just tried to reproduce your problem by downloading GNU coreutils and running configure like this: $ LDFLAGS=-flto CFLAGS="-Os -flto" ./configure it definitely passes -flto to the compiler. I can't get to the linking stage because binutils is missing a plugin. Probably something wrong with my gcc setup. But autoconf is not removing -flto. BTW: About non-standard environments: Go ask among your friends for people who do embedded systems development, and let them show you their environment. You'd be surprised.