Saint's Log

Fixing Hsdis Compile Failure in GNU binutils

The previous post on Building HSDIS in Cygwin required running this command to actually build the hsdis DLL.

make OS=Linux MINGW=x86_64-w64-mingw32 BINUTILS=~/binutils-2.37

As it turns out, this make command fails because of a bug in the GNU binutils source code. This is the error I got:

...
x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc -c -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -O    -I. -I/home/User/binutils-2.37/libiberty/../include  -W -Wall -Wwrite-strings -Wc++-compat -Wstrict-prototypes -Wshadow=local -pedantic  -D_GNU_SOURCE  /home/User/binutils-2.37/libiberty/rust-demangle.c -o rust-demangle.o
/home/User/binutils-2.37/libiberty/rust-demangle.c:78:3: error: unknown type name ‘uint’
   78 |   uint recursion;
      |   ^~~~
/home/User/binutils-2.37/libiberty/rust-demangle.c: In function ‘demangle_path’:
/home/User/binutils-2.37/libiberty/rust-demangle.c:81:37: error: ‘uint’ undeclared (first use in this function); did you mean ‘int’?
   81 | #define RUST_NO_RECURSION_LIMIT   ((uint) -1)
      |                                     ^~~~
...
make[2]: *** [Makefile:1230: rust-demangle.o] Error 1
...

At this point, I wasn’t sure which version I used to build successfully. Searching for that error (and binutils to narrow things down) led to this bug in the sourceware.org Bugzilla that appears to be the exact bug I ran into: 28207 – error: unknown type name ‘uint’ (78 | uint recursion;) avr-gcc mingw32 Windows Build (sourceware.org). Fortunately, one Alan helpfully points out that this bug fixed on the binutils-2.37 branch with commit 999566402e3.

To figure out where the binutils git repo is, I click on the Browse button in Bugzilla then navigate to the binutils product category, which has a link to the list of bugs for the binutils component. A re-opened bug seems likely to have a link to some commits. I select 26865 – windres: –preprocessor option won’t respect space in file path (sourceware.org) and sure enough, there is a link to a commit on the binutils repo. We can now view the history of rust-demangle.c. To find the commit in question, click on any commitdiff to get the URL format then replace the hash in the URL with 999566402e3 to reveal the aforementioned fix for the unknown type name uint error.

Cloning binutils Repo

I’m used to GitHub where looking at the repo structure implies that you’re at a URL you can copy and trim to clone. In this other web view, the URL to clone is listed above the shortlog:

git clone https://sourceware.org/git/binutils-gdb.git

Tracing the Bug

At this point, it makes sense to verify that the 2.37 sources I downloaded actually contain the bug. Observe that:

1. the tags section contains a binutils-2_37 tag described as “Official GNU Binutils 2.37 Release” and committed on Sun, 18 Jul 2021 16:46:54 +0000 (17:46 +0100).
2. the fix for the build error shows a fix committed by Alan on Mon, 19 Jul 2021 11:32:21 +0000 (21:02 +0930)
3. the bug fix that introduced the error was committed on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 15:51:56 +0000 (16:51 +0100)

Therefore, using binutils older than 2.37 should work just fine. However, it may still be necessary to run “rm -fr build” in the hsdis folder to enable 2.36 to be picked up when you run make (otherwise 2.37 is still baked into some of configure’s output).