gdb seg faults when reading symbols - c++

Question

When trying to run gdb with a program, it seg faults while reading symbols.
When I run:
gdb /home/user/path/to/program.exe
I get:
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Reading symbols from /home/user/path/to/program.exe...Segmentation fault (core dumped)
I suspect that the binary might be too large for gdb to load into memory. This error only occurs when I compile with -g (debug flag). Here's the difference in size of the binaries:
Compiled with
-release flag: 405 MB
-debug flag: 862 MB
Any ideas on other culprits of this segmentation fault? Or is there a way to increase the memory allowed for gdb? This turns out to be a very challenging problem to google.

Answer 1

I was having the same problem with gdb 7.9 on Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64, which I had installed simply using apt-get install gdb.
I solved the problem by compiling and installing a previous version: gdb 7.5.1.
I had to download a library (which I found out here) and I also had to run ./configure using some arguments (which I found out here). Everything else is straightforward.
Good luck.
Here are the commands:
$ cd
$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev
$ wget ftp://sourceware.org/pub/gdb/releases/gdb-7.5.1.tar.gz
$ tar zxf gdb-7.5.1.tar.gz
$ cd gdb-7.5.1
$ sudo ./configure --disable-werror
$ sudo make
$ sudo make install

Answer 2

If you compile without the -g flag then you are not including debugging information in your executable, so when gdb loads there's much less information to load in.
If gdb segfaults during start up then this is a gdb bug, there's no executable that you should be able to pass to gdb that should cause a segfault, at worst you should get some error message.
You could try running gdb under gdb, (just do gdb --args gdb /home/user/path/to/program.exe) this will not help you much, but might give some insight into what is wrong with gdb, you could then file a gdb bug here: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/enter_bug.cgi?product=gdb but this is only worth doing if you either have good steps to reproduce, or a backtrace from a crashed gdb.
Reinstalling gdb might help, but I wouldn't hold much hope of that solving the problem, unless you change the version of gdb you install, gdb itself is a pretty easy program to install, so pretty hard to get wrong.
You could also try building gdb from git, it's pretty easy, and the bug might have already been fixed, start from here: http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/current/
If you extend your question with a backtrace from a crashed gdb then others might be able to offer you more of an insight into why this is crashing, but the blame is definitely with your version of gdb.