gprof produces empty output

Question

I'm running Ubuntu 16.10 and trying to profile a program using gprof. I compile with the flag -pg and the program is single-threaded. The actual compile commands are:

g++ -I. -std=c++11 -Wall -Wextra -O3 -pg -fPIC -Wno-unused-parameter -c -o build/obj/performance/stencil_application.o test/performance/stencil_application.cpp g++ -I. -std=c++11 -Wall -Wextra -O3 -pg -Wno-unused-parameter build/obj/performance/stencil_application.o -o build/test/performance/stencil_application 

The program takes a couple of seconds to finish when I run it, and a file named gmon.out is produced. However, when I run gprof ./build/test/performance/stencil_application, the output I get contains no numbers. I only get the table headings and the explanation for the different fields, like this:

Flat profile:  Each sample counts as 0.01 seconds.   %   cumulative   self              self     total             time   seconds   seconds    calls  Ts/call  Ts/call  name       %         the percentage of the total running time of the time       program used by this function.  cumulative a running sum of the number of seconds accounted  seconds   for by this function and those listed above it.   self      the number of seconds accounted for by this seconds    function alone.  This is the major sort for this            listing.  calls      the number of times this function was invoked, if            this function is profiled, else blank.   self      the average number of milliseconds spent in this ms/call    function per call, if this function is profiled,            else blank.   total     the average number of milliseconds spent in this ms/call    function and its descendents per call, if this            function is profiled, else blank.  name       the name of the function.  This is the minor sort            for this listing. The index shows the location of            the function in the gprof listing. If the index is            in parenthesis it shows where it would appear in            the gprof listing if it were to be printed.  Copyright (C) 2012-2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved.                       Call graph (explanation follows)   granularity: each sample hit covers 2 byte(s) no time propagated  index % time    self  children    called     name   This table describes the call tree of the program, and was sorted by  the total amount of time spent in each function and its children. 

and so on.

I've also tried to compile without -O3 and with -g, but with the same result. Does anybody know what's wrong?

Answer 1

As pointed out in the comment by Tony Beta Lambda above, this is a bug in gcc. There are two possible workarounds: Downgrade to gcc-4.9, or compile with the flag -no-pie.