I have just noticed that Linaro version and GCC version do not match.
As of today current stable version of GCC is 6.2.
Current stable version of Linaro is 6.1-2016.08 (link from Linaro's main page).
There is also Linaro version 6.2-2016.11 available for download.
Release notes for Linaro 6.1-2016.08 and Linaro 6.2-2016.11 contain information about GCC 6 with the link to its release notes.
Based on it I expected that Linaro 6.1-2016.08 and Linaro 6.2-2016.11 are based on GCC 6.1 and GCC 6.2 respectively.
But it turned out that actual version of GCC in Linaro builds is 5.3:
yurko@my_pc /cygdrive/f/Linaro/gcc-linaro-6.1.1-2016.08-i686-mingw32_arm-eabi/bin
$ arm-eabi-gcc.exe -E -dM - < /dev/null | grep __GNUC__
#define __GNUC__ 5
yurko@my_pc /cygdrive/f/Linaro/gcc-linaro-6.1.1-2016.08-i686-mingw32_arm-eabi/bin
$ arm-eabi-gcc.exe --version
arm-eabi-gcc.exe (GCC) 5.3.0
yurko@my_pc /cygdrive/f/Linaro/gcc-linaro-6.2.1-2016.11-i686-mingw32_arm-eabi/bin
$ arm-eabi-gcc.exe -E -dM - < /dev/null | grep __GNUC__
#define __GNUC__ 5
yurko@my_pc /cygdrive/f/Linaro/gcc-linaro-6.2.1-2016.11-i686-mingw32_arm-eabi/bin
$ arm-eabi-gcc.exe --version
arm-eabi-gcc.exe (GCC) 5.3.0
Linaro GCC FAQ Page says nothing about it.
(Posted on behalf of the OP).
The question is not relevant.
It turned out that arm-eabi-gcc.exe from wrong toolchain was used.
I should have specified explicitly the path by preceding it with './'.