qemu: uncaught target signal 4 (Illegal instruction) but gdb remote-debug exited normally I'm getting Illegal instruction (core dumped) when running the attached a.out_err binary in qemu, but when using Gdb to remote-debug the program, it exited normally. will appreciate if you can help look into this qemu issue. readelf -h a.out_err ELF Header: Magic: 7f 45 4c 46 01 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 Class: ELF32 Data: 2's complement, little endian Version: 1 (current) OS/ABI: UNIX - System V ABI Version: 0 Type: EXEC (Executable file) Machine: ARM Version: 0x1 Entry point address: 0x8220 Start of program headers: 52 (bytes into file) Start of section headers: 54228 (bytes into file) Flags: 0x5000200, Version5 EABI, soft-float ABI Size of this header: 52 (bytes) Size of program headers: 32 (bytes) Number of program headers: 3 Size of section headers: 40 (bytes) Number of section headers: 16 Section header string table index: 15 qemu-arm version 4.0.0 QEMU 4.0 is quite old now -- does this reproduce with a more recent QEMU? yes, it reproduced on QEMU 5.0.0. For me, with current head-of-git QEMU, the program crashes with a SIGSEGV very early in execution, because: 0x00008260: e59f30f0 ldr r3, [pc, #0xf0] loads 0 into r3, and then 0x00008270: e1a0d003 mov sp, r3 sets sp to 0, and then 0x000087b0: e92d4030 push {r4, r5, lr} tries to write to addres 0, which causes a SEGV. This happens whether using the gdbstub or not. 0x00008260 <+64>: ldr r3, [pc, #240] 0x00008264 <+68>: cmp r1, #0 => 0x00008268 <+72>: beq 0x8270 0x0000826c <+76>: mov r3, r1 0x00008270 <+80>: mov sp, r3 (gdb) p/x $r1 $2 = 0xfffef690 But r1 is not zero when using Gdb remote-debug, so it will enter 0x0000826c <+76>: mov r3, r1 QEMU 5.0.0. GNU gdb (GDB; SUSE Linux Enterprise 12) 8.0.1 Oh, your code is trying to use the SYS_HEAPINFO semihosting call to figure out where the stack and heap are. This is generally a bad idea if you're using QEMU user-mode emulation: you start with a perfectly good stack pointer and you should just use the usual Linux syscalls to allocate heap if you need it. I have no idea where your code is getting r1 from -- it's too painful to try to reverse-engineer it from the binary. I can't repro any difference between with-gdb and without -- for me with current QEMU r1 is 0 whether running with the gdb stub or not. The QEMU project is currently moving its bug tracking to another system. For this we need to know which bugs are still valid and which could be closed already. Thus we are setting the bug state to "Incomplete" now. If the bug has already been fixed in the latest upstream version of QEMU, then please close this ticket as "Fix released". If it is not fixed yet and you think that this bug report here is still valid, then you have two options: 1) If you already have an account on gitlab.com, please open a new ticket for this problem in our new tracker here: https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues and then close this ticket here on Launchpad (or let it expire auto- matically after 60 days). Please mention the URL of this bug ticket on Launchpad in the new ticket on GitLab. 2) If you don't have an account on gitlab.com and don't intend to get one, but still would like to keep this ticket opened, then please switch the state back to "New" or "Confirmed" within the next 60 days (other- wise it will get closed as "Expired"). We will then eventually migrate the ticket automatically to the new system (but you won't be the reporter of the bug in the new system and thus you won't get notified on changes anymore). Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience. [Expired for QEMU because there has been no activity for 60 days.]