The validation library is now linked to the kernel, but throws a memory access error (MemoryAccessOutOfBounds) when using parity_wasm::deserialize_buffer.
This is due to insufficient memory allocation in wasm. Perhaps this is something about the way that parity-wasm requests/allocates memory that doesn't fit with the memory allocation in the pwasm toolchain. I was able to hack around this by manually increasing the number of memory pages in the kernel wasm file manually (from 2 to 5).
For the purposes of testing it's probably worth just bumping the memory up until we get a better handle on what the issue is.