I am working on a native Android project using NDK r12b. This NDK (and it looks like all others since) ships with a prebuilt GNU linker version 2.25. We have recently tried to pull up lots of our project's submodules which has introduced a build error that looks like it is caused by this bug in ld.
build error output:
/opt/android-ndk-r12b/toolchains/arm-linux-androideabi-4.9/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-linux-androideabi/4.9.x/../../../../arm-linux-androideabi/bin/ld: internal error in do_relocate_sections, at /usr/local/google/buildbot/src/android/gcc/toolchain/build/../binutils/binutils-2.25/gold/reloc.cc:953
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
I thought I would attempt to update the linker but have had no luck finding prebuilt binaries. So I went down the rabbit hole of trying to compile ld/binutils myself. Either my Google skills are failing me, or documentation for doing this is truly rare or presumes the user has a lot of introductory knowledge that I don't have.
When building binutils 2.29.1 with target=arm-linux my application build errors out with this result:
/opt/android-ndk-r12b/toolchains/arm-linux-androideabi-4.9/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-linux-androideabi/4.9.x/../../../../arm-linux-androideabi/bin/ld: unrecognised emulation mode: armelf_linux_eabi
Supported emulations: armelf_linux armelf armelfb armelfb_linux
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
For reference, the -V output of our current version of ld is:
me@linux-vm:/opt/android-ndk-r12b/toolchains/arm-linux-androideabi-4.9/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/arm-linux-androideabi/bin$ ./ld-2.25 -V
GNU gold (binutils-2.25-0666073 2.25.51.20141117) 1.11
Supported targets:
elf64-littleaarch64
elf64-bigaarch64
elf32-littleaarch64
elf32-bigaarch64
elf64-tradlittlemips
elf32-tradlittlemips-nacl
elf64-tradbigmips
elf32-tradlittlemips-nacl
elf32-tradlittlemips
elf32-tradlittlemips-nacl
elf32-tradbigmips
elf32-tradlittlemips-nacl
elf32-tilegx-be
elf64-tilegx-be
elf32-tilegx-le
elf64-tilegx-le
elf32-bigarm
elf32-bigarm-nacl
elf32-littlearm
elf32-littlearm-nacl
elf64-powerpcle
elf64-powerpc
elf32-powerpcle
elf32-powerpc
elf64-sparc
elf32-sparc
elf32-x86-64
elf32-x86-64-freebsd
elf32-x86-64-nacl
elf64-x86-64
elf64-x86-64-freebsd
elf64-x86-64-nacl
elf32-i386
elf32-i386-freebsd
elf32-i386-nacl
Supported emulations:
aarch64_elf64_le_vec
aarch64_elf64_be_vec
aarch64_elf32_le_vec
aarch64_elf32_be_vec
elf64-tradlittlemips
elf32-tradlittlemips-nacl
elf64-tradbigmips
elf32-tradlittlemips-nacl
elf32-tradlittlemips
elf32-tradlittlemips-nacl
elf32-tradbigmips
elf32-tradlittlemips-nacl
elf32tilegx_be
elf64tilegx_be
elf32tilegx
elf64tilegx
armelfb
armelfb_nacl
armelf
armelf_nacl
elf64lppc
elf64ppc
elf32lppc
elf32ppc
elf64_sparc
elf32_sparc
elf32_x86_64
elf32_x86_64_nacl
elf_x86_64
elf_x86_64_nacl
elf_i386
elf_i386_nacl
So apparently I'm missing some important configuration parameters. I also tried using an older (r8e) Android NDK's build/tools/build-gcc.sh script to build the entire compiler toolchain but with a newer binutils version. This resulted in an unknown build error:
me@linux-vm:/opt/android-ndk-r8e/build/tools$ ./build-gcc.sh --gmp-version=5.0.5 --mpfr-version=3.1.1 --mpc-version=1.0.1 --binutils-version=2.26
$(pwd)/src $(pwd) arm-linux-androideabi-4.7
To follow build in another terminal, please use: tail -F /tmp/ndk-me/build/toolchain/config.log
Using C compiler: gcc -m32
Using C++ compiler: g++ -m32
Sysroot : Copying: /opt/android-ndk-r8e/platforms/android-9/arch-arm --> /tmp/ndk-me/build/toolchain/prefix/sysroot
Configure: arm-linux-androideabi-4.7 toolchain build
Building : arm-linux-androideabi-4.7 toolchain [this can take a long time].
Error while building toolchain. See /tmp/ndk-me/build/toolchain/config.log
Last entries of config.log:
ar cru libintl.a bindtextdom.o dcgettext.o dgettext.o gettext.o finddomain.o loadmsgcat.o localealias.o textdomain.o l10nflist.o explodename.o dcigettext.o dcngettext.o dngettext.o ngettext.o plural.o plural-exp.o localcharset.o relocatable.o localename.o log.o osdep.o intl-compat.o
ranlib libintl.a
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/ndk-me/build/toolchain/libbfd-binutils-2.26/intl'
At this point I'm just spinning my tires and trying to brute force success with different combinations of configuration parameters and source package versions. It seems as simple as adding emulation support for armelf_linux_eabi, but like I said, I have failed to find any documentation or guides that show how to do this. Surely there is a GNU wizard out there somewhere who could point me down a better path? Any help is appreciated!
I would try --enable-targets=all first. It is a bit of a big hammer, but maybe it helps you to avoid figuring out the exact target triplets you need (my guess would be arm-unknown-linux-eabi).