arm-none-eabi-objdump: error while loading shared libraries: libdebuginfod.so.1: cannot open shared object file

Question

If you have an answer for this, or further information, I'd welcome it. I'm following advice from here , to offer some unsolicited help by posting this question then an answer I've already found for it.

I have a bare-metal ARM board for which I'm building a cross-toolchain, from sources for GNU binutils, gcc and gdb, and for SourceWare's Newlib. I got those four working and cross-built a DoNothing.c into an ELF file - but I couldn't disassemble it with this:

 $ arm-none-eabi-objdump -S DoNothing.elf

The error was:

 $ arm-none-eabi-objdump: error while loading shared libraries: libdebuginfod.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I'll follow up with a solution.

Answer 1

The error was correct - my system didn't have libdebuginfod.so.1 installed - but I have another cross-binutils, installed from binary for a different target, and its objdump -S works fine on the same host. Why would one build of objdump complain about missing that shared library, when clearly not all builds of objdump need it?

First I tried rebuilding cross binutils, specifying --without-debuginfod as a configure option. No change, which seems odd: surely that should build tools that not only don't use debuginfod but which don't depend on it in any way. (If someone can answer that, or point out what I've misunderstood, it may help people.)

Next I figured debuginfod was inescapable (for my cross-tools built from source at least), so I'd install it to get rid of the error. It's a component of the elfutils package, but installing the latest elfutils available for my Ubuntu 20.04 system didn't bring libdebuginfod.so.1 with it.

I found a later one, for Arch Linux, whose package contents suggested it would - but its package format doesn't match Ubuntu's and installing it was going to involve a lot of work. Instead I opted to build it from the Arch Linux source package . However, running./configure on that gave a couple of infuriatingly similar errors:

 configure: checking libdebuginfod dependencies, --disable-libdebuginfod or --enable-libdebuginfo=dummy to skip
 ...
 configure: error: dependencies not found, use --disable-libdebuginfod to disable or --enable-libdebuginfod=dummy to build a (bootstrap) dummy library.

No combination of those suggestions would allow configure for elfutils-0.182 to run to completion.

The problem of course was my own lack of understanding. The solution came from the Linux From Scratch project: what worked was to issue configure with both of the suggested options, like this:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr                \
              --disable-debuginfod         \
              --enable-libdebuginfod=dummy \
              --libdir=/lib

That gave a clean configure; make worked first time, as did make check and then sudo make install which of course installed libdebuginfod.so.1 as required. I then had an arm-none-eabi-objdump which disassembles cross-compiled ELF files without complaining.