Visual Studio - Android - GDB exited unexpectedly with exit code -1073741571 (0xC00000FD) : While Loading Symbols

Issue

I have a C++ gradle app set up in Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition targeting Android. I'm using NDK 20 (the latest version in Microsoft's android sdk repo).

This app is composed of several .so libraries (SDL2, SDL2_image, SDL2_ttf, WolfSSL, MyGameCode, MyGameLibrary, MiscellaneousExternalDependencies.a) and all seems to compile and run properly. The issue I have is in attaching a breakpoint and seeing GDB trying to load the symbols for the associated .so (in this case, my game code specifically).

I have done some testing and found that if I strip out all my game code I can get breakpoints to hit with just my library and all other dependencies. I've also tested and found that including most of my game files still runs. However I have about 10 files that if I remove them everything seems to load just fine. It takes about 42 seconds to load symbols when I have a stripped down version of my project which allows for breakpoints to be hit.

It seems to be total symbols in the project rather than any specific code running during the application's lifetime since I have a main finction in C++ specified which does not load any of my game code and just runs a simple SDL2 test and simply by changing the number of files included in the project I can reproduce the GDB crash or eliminate it.

I should note that my project seems to run just fine without the debugger attached, and I can see output from the C++ modules I'm trying to set breakpoints in. The issue I have is limited to when I try to connect GDB and access a breakpoint through Visual Studio. At that point I am getting what appears to be a stack overflow (or possibly a timeout?) during the symbol loading process.

My question here has a few bullet points:

• does GDB have some kind of symbol limit?
  • If so, is there a way to strip unused symbols from the final ".so" during the build process from within Visual Studio? I want to keep my build process simple to execute.
  • If not, can I break my project up in some kind of way with .so or .a files to get around this? It doesn't seem that it makes a difference currently if I do that so more advice would be appreciated!
• Does Visual Studio's wrapper of GDB and the Android Emulator allow me to increase the timeout if there is a timeout? If I could specify it at like 200 seconds that would definitely be more than enough time to load my project's .so symbols.
• Are there any other possible explanations for crashing on loading symbols in this way that have plausible work-arounds?

Essentially I don't know why it's crashing during loading symbols for my .so file

I have provided additional details here including a link to my project and exact testing methodology, but the full thrust of this question is present in this post.

https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/898890/gdb-exited-unexpectedly-with-exit-code-1073741571.html

Solution

It turns out replacing the gdb.exe and gdb-orig.exe files from my Microsoft Hosted NDK version 20.0.5594570 with the ones I got from downloading NDK 21 available here solved the problem (r21 at the time of writing): https://developer.android.com/ndk/downloads

There must be a defect which has been recently resolved in GDB itself and which had issues with my project size and/or composition. The NDK r21 bundled version of GDB works perfectly, however.

Answered By - M2tM