Oh, I was rather referring to the padding issue.
[Edit] Forget about it, I haven't seen your first post, but now I did.
Regarding the linker: It seems to be some feature of the macho binary format or alike. Yes, it can be avoided by compiler flags (-fno-common) or linker flag (something with single module) or by explicitly initializing as far as I learnt. I am not sure what would be the right way. According to what I read on a mailing list, the linker flag should be the right way, but well... I think fixes in C code are more stable than forcing compiler/linker flags.