I see, I'm probably asking in the wrong place then.
When I say 'link steps', I mean running ld:
$ cargo +nightly rustc --bin rcc -- -Z time-passes
Compiling rcc v0.1.0 (/home/joshua/Documents/Programming/rust/rcc)
... snip ...
time: 3.862; rss: 201MB running linker
time: 3.865; rss: 201MB linking
time: 4.292; rss: 139MB total