SIGILL when debugging on Raspberry Pi

[philAtkin]

I built, and was able to debug the tutorial program, on the RPi without problem.  When I built a more substantial project, however, I couldn’t start the debugging session (a SIGILL  – illegal instruction – exception was thrown; if I continued the program exited without doing anything useful).

I discovered that the executable did run standalone on the RPi, but that it wouldn’t run under GDB.

I found the following threads useful: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/766, https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2015-03/msg00925.html  They confirm that there was a bug in the RPi firmware that caused gdb to break and exit before it even started the program under test.

The RPi firmware is now fixed, and following the instructions here: https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update  I updated it as follows:
sudo apt-get install rpi-update
sudo rpi-update
sudo reboot

Hope this helps someone else.

[Author]

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