gdb seg faults when reading symbols

Question

When trying to run gdb with a program, it seg faults while reading symbols.

When I run:

gdb /home/user/path/to/program.exe

I get:

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Reading symbols from /home/user/path/to/program.exe...Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I suspect that the binary might be too large for gdb to load into memory. This error only occurs when I compile with -g (debug flag). Here's the difference in size of the binaries:

Compiled with

-release flag: 405 MB

-debug flag: 862 MB

Any ideas on other culprits of this segmentation fault? Or is there a way to increase the memory allowed for gdb? This turns out to be a very challenging problem to google.

Answer 1

I was having the same problem with gdb 7.9 on Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64, which I had installed simply using apt-get install gdb.

I solved the problem by compiling and installing a previous version: gdb 7.5.1.

I had to download a library (which I found out here) and I also had to run ./configure using some arguments (which I found out here). Everything else is straightforward.

Good luck.

Here are the commands:

$ cd
$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev
$ wget ftp://sourceware.org/pub/gdb/releases/gdb-7.5.1.tar.gz
$ tar zxf gdb-7.5.1.tar.gz
$ cd gdb-7.5.1
$ sudo ./configure --disable-werror
$ sudo make
$ sudo make install