ive been struggling with my arm machines linking against libgcc_s.so for most binaries and trying to figure out why this is ... the guys in #debian-arm set me straight today ... since the generic arm spec doesnt have cpu instruction support for math operations (like div/mult), an userspace library is required to provide this support gcc does this in the form of libgcc_s.so ... and since core files in /{bin,sbin,lib}/ (like fsck!) need this library, we need to move it off of /usr and into /lib since doing something basic as mounting /usr on a different partition currently breaks horribly :)
and this actually seems to be affecting ia64 somewhat
gcc-config-1.3.8 now copies libgcc_s.so to /lib