I've found that, contrary to the message in commit
9367fe926196f407705bb07cd29c6e40eb1774dd, all relevant gas versions
actually do support .syntax unified, and assemble memcpy.s
successfully with the attached patch applied. If there are no
objections I'd like to go ahead and commit it. The only remaining
.word hacks I'm aware of are in setjmp and longjmp, but they may still
be needed to avoid wrongly flagging plain EABI (softfloat) binaries
as needing hardfloat. I'd really like some feedback on what the issues
with that are and how to best avoid problems. Hopefully we can make
the transition to UAL syntax quickly in the next release cycle and get
Cortex-M support (with the new ARM FDPIC ABI).

Rich