arm-none-eabi-ld: Error: unable to disambiguate: -nostartfiles

[AlexanderVasiljev]

I have faced the same issue as #3209.

I have just installed Ubuntu 21.04. The first build on new Ubuntu failed with this error.

LOG

LD: nuttx
arm-none-eabi-ld: Error: unable to disambiguate: -nostartfiles (did you mean --nostartfiles ?)
make[1]: *** [Makefile:156: nuttx] Error 1

GCC version

arm-none-eabi-gcc --version
arm-none-eabi-gcc (15:9-2019-q4-0ubuntu2) 9.2.1 20191025 (release) [ARM/arm-9-branch revision 277599]

Ld version

arm-none-eabi-ld --version
GNU ld (2.36.1-0ubuntu1+14build1) 2.36.1

[Ouss4]

Oh this issue is now on Debian based distros as well?

We've seen this (a general did you mean --option instead of -option) in arch based distros. We couldn't see any references in the GNU project where -option is replaced with --option, so we assumed an issue in the Arch package.

Anyway, did you try to download the toolchain as described in #3209?

[AlexanderVasiljev]

See my question on binutils
https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2021-June/116825.html

The answer https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2021-June/116826.html
from nickc@redhat.com is

The -nostartfiles option is a gcc command line option, not a linker
command line option. It is used when gcc is creating an executable
binary and it tells gcc not to include the standard system files
(eg crt1.o, crtbegin.o, crtend.o etc) when gcc invokes the linker.

All of which means that in your build system somewhere you have:

arm-none-eabi-ld -nostartfiles ...

whereas you probably meant to have:

arm-none-eabi-gcc -nostartfiles ...

Note: the reason why this problem has appeared when you upgraded is
that we recently added some extra error checking to the linker to
attempt to detect mis-spelt command line options. In particular the
linker interprets options that start with a single dash as if they
were multiple, single letter options. So "-nostartfiles" would be
treated as "-n" "-o startfiles" which is probably not what the user
wanted. Hence the error message.

Plus, just to be clear, the linker does not support a --nostartfiles
option. The code that generates the error message does not actually
check to see if the double dash version of the option exists...

[AlexanderVasiljev]

The flag nostartfiles is not a flag of ld. So it shouldn't appear in LDFLAGS += -nostartfiles

I assume that we should change
LDFLAGS += -nostartfiles -nodefaultlibs
to
CXXFLAGS += -nostartfiles -nodefaultlibs
in every board Make.defs

It works for my board

[AlexanderVasiljev]

#3836

[hartmannathan]

This is caused by Binutils being updated to the 2.36.x line.

This is fixed by PR #3836

This is now documented at Release Notes for the (future) NuttX-10.2 release:

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NUTTX/NuttX+10.2#ld-now-called-through-gcc