diff --git a/UPDATING b/UPDATING
index 123c05ae975..53c7bdd7f28 100644
--- a/UPDATING
+++ b/UPDATING
@@ -31,6 +31,13 @@ NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT FreeBSD 11.x IS SLOW:
 	disable the most expensive debugging functionality run
 	"ln -s 'abort:false,junk:false' /etc/malloc.conf".)
 
+20150107:
+	The ELF object manipulation tool objcopy is now provided by the
+	ELF Tool Chain project rather than by GNU binutils. It should be a
+	drop-in replacement, with the addition of arm64 support. The
+	(temporary) src.conf knob WITHOUT_ELFCOPY_AS_OBJCOPY knob may be set
+	to obtain the GNU version if necessary.
+
 20160129:
 	Building ZFS pools on top of zvols is prohibited by default.  That
 	feature has never worked safely; it's always been prone to deadlocks.
diff --git a/share/mk/src.opts.mk b/share/mk/src.opts.mk
index 678c31ef054..a3d6a0cef1f 100644
--- a/share/mk/src.opts.mk
+++ b/share/mk/src.opts.mk
@@ -80,6 +80,7 @@ __DEFAULT_YES_OPTIONS = \
     DYNAMICROOT \
     ED_CRYPTO \
     EE \
+    ELFCOPY_AS_OBJCOPY \
     ELFTOOLCHAIN_BOOTSTRAP \
     EXAMPLES \
     FDT \
@@ -231,9 +232,9 @@ __DEFAULT_NO_OPTIONS+=CLANG CLANG_BOOTSTRAP CLANG_FULL CLANG_IS_CC
 # In-tree binutils/gcc are older versions without modern architecture support.
 .if ${__T} == "aarch64" || ${__T} == "riscv64"
 BROKEN_OPTIONS+=BINUTILS BINUTILS_BOOTSTRAP GCC GCC_BOOTSTRAP GDB
-__DEFAULT_YES_OPTIONS+=ELFCOPY_AS_OBJCOPY LLVM_LIBUNWIND
+__DEFAULT_YES_OPTIONS+=LLVM_LIBUNWIND
 .else
-__DEFAULT_NO_OPTIONS+=ELFCOPY_AS_OBJCOPY LLVM_LIBUNWIND
+__DEFAULT_NO_OPTIONS+=LLVM_LIBUNWIND
 .endif
 .if ${__T} == "riscv64"
 BROKEN_OPTIONS+=PROFILE # "sorry, unimplemented: profiler support for RISC-V"