There are some reports that debuginfod client and/or server parts of elfutils may not build correctly when configured in a cross-arch mode, so people are advised to disable it: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~thomas/multilib/chapter08/libelf.html % CC="gcc -m32" ./configure \ --host=i686-pc-linux-gnu \ --prefix=/usr \ --libdir=/usr/lib32 \ --disable-debuginfod \ --enable-libdebuginfod=dummy This sort of build should also work and/or be automagically disabled, rather than require the manual configury flagging.
They suggest the same settings for native compilation: % ./configure --prefix=/usr \ --disable-debuginfod \ --enable-libdebuginfod=dummy I think this is just to simplify the bootstrap path, since otherwise elfutils requires a lot of dependencies. I haven't noticed any issues when cross compiling.
I can confirm that on x86_64 fedora, with all i386 devel packages installed the following configure/build works and passes all tests: CC="gcc -m32" CXX="g++ -m32" ./configure --host=i686-pc-linux-gnu --enable-debuginfod && make -j8 && make check -j8 ============================================================================ Testsuite summary for elfutils 0.186 ============================================================================ # TOTAL: 255 # PASS: 249 # SKIP: 6 # XFAIL: 0 # FAIL: 0 # XPASS: 0 # ERROR: 0 ============================================================================