I had some problems to get IcedTea compiled on our i386, x86_64 and powerpc64 boxes. It turned out to be the -z def linker option and the glibc version used. A little google'ing revealed the fix. Just add the AS_NEEDED directive as shown below:

$ cat /usr/lib64/libc.so 
/* GNU ld script
   Use the shared library, but some functions are only in
   the static library, so try that secondarily.  */
OUTPUT_FORMAT(elf64-powerpc)
GROUP ( /lib/libc.so.6 /usr/lib/libc_nonshared.a AS_NEEDED (
/lib/ld64.so.1 ) )