I have been trying to enable the gold linker on FreeBSD to use the link time optimizations. I made gold from the binutils under /usr/ports. After building binutils using make -k install clean i got ld under /usr/bin and in the directory /usr/local/bin i got ld, ld.gold and ld.bfd.

Now while trying to use link time optimization for the simple example programs here <http://llvm.org/docs/GoldPlugin.html> (a.c and b.c under the heading 'Examples of Link Time Optimization') i entered the four commands as follows:

```
clang -flto a.c -c -o a.o 
ar q a.a a.o 
clang b.c -c -o b.o 
clang -flto a.a b.o -o main

```

I got the following error:

```
usr/bin/ld: unrecogonized option '-plugin'
usr/bin/ld: use the --help option for usage information
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)

```

Is there the problem with the linker that ld.gold is not being called. Should I replace the ld with ld.gold? Does the linker looks in the right directiry for the .so plugins?

The LLVMgold.so and libLTO.so shared objects are in the directory /usr/local/llvm-devel/lib/.
I cannot find the directory where clang is installed. I am not sure where to make the bfd-plugins directory and add the symlinks to LLVMgold.so and libLTO.so.

I am using freebsd 10.1 release. How to enable the gold linker for link time optimizations?
also how can I enable it to be the default linker?