gdb can't debug the 32bits program for linux

Question

How to solve this? When I use the gdb to debug the 32bits program, this warning appeared. And this made the program can't run.

This is the configuration information about gdb

Answer 1

If you want to debug the 32-bit application on 64-bit ubuntu. Try it.

sudo apt-get install gdb-multiarch

Answer 2

I hit the same issue. After testing with various setups and machines, I have concluded that the gdb version (8.1) Ubuntu 18.04 ships with is buggy. More recent versions of gdb seem to work just fine (that is: you don't see these weird warnings + gdb doesn't hang when debugging 32-bits programs).

I've tried on Ubuntu 19.04, which ships with gdb 8.2, and it works fine out of the box. I've also tried to compile the most recent version (at the time of writing: 8.3.1) and it works fine (even on Ubuntu 18.04).

My suggestion is to grab the latest version of gdb (at the time of writing: 8.3.1) and compile it yourself. You can grab the source bundles here: https://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/gdb/releases/.

Another (very) sub-ideal solution that seems to work: you can install the gdb:i386 package, which will install gdb for 32bits application. However, it will uninstall gdb for 64bits, which you may not want to do.

I have no idea what's the underlying issue and whether or not there is a quick way to fix it.