Freedom Studio sifive-welcome.elf: file format not recognized

HiFive Unmatched
1

Suddenly:

/Applications/FreedomStudio.app/Contents/Eclipse/SiFive/riscv64-unknown-elf-toolchain-10.2.0-2020.12.8/bin/riscv64-unknown-elf-objcopy:
/Users/alain/wsFreedomStudio/qemu_sifive_s51_sifive_welcome/src/debug/sifive-welcome.elf: file format not recognized
make: *** [Makefile:315: /Users/alain/wsFreedomStudio/qemu_sifive_s51_sifive_welcome/src/debug/sifive-welcome.hex] Error 1

How to fix it ?

2

Is /Users/alain/wsFreedomStudio/qemu_sifive_s51_sifive_welcome/src/debug/sifive-welcome.elf actually a RISC-V ELF file? What does file /Users/alain/wsFreedomStudio/qemu_sifive_s51_sifive_welcome/src/debug/sifive-welcome.elf say?

3

I work with this file for more than two months now. Freedom studio compile RISC-V .S and .c without problem until now.

I am sorry I don’t understand what … /sifive-welcome.elf say?

4

Run the exact command there.

5

zsh: permission denied: /Users/alain/wsFreedomStudio/qemu_sifive_s51_sifive_welcome/src/debug/sifive-welcome.elf

The Finder info show that I have a Read & Write permission.
I set the same permission to “staff” and “everyone” but the same error message is shown.

6

I said run file /Users/alain/wsFreedomStudio/qemu_sifive_s51_sifive_welcome/src/debug/sifive-welcome.elf. Clearly trying to run the bare-metal RISC-V binary on x86 or arm64 macOS is not going to work.

7

Hi Alain,

Jessica is suggesting running the ‘file’ command with the elf file as an arqument, like:

$ file sifive-welcome.elf

That should give you output like:

$ file sifive-welcome.elf
sifive-welcome.elf: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, UCB RISC-V, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, with debug_info, not stripped

That is what I see on Ubuntu, should be similar on MacOS (but I have not tried). I don’t know that the ‘file’ command is natively available on MacOS, you may need to install it via homebrew, if not.

8

My apologies, “file” is part of the command. The output of the command is:

/Users/alain/wsFreedomStudio/qemu_sifive_s51_sifive_welcome/src/debug/sifive-welcome.elf: GCC precompiled header (version 014) for C

1 Like
9

So it looks like the ELF file was produced using, possibly, a native toolchain and not the SiFive RISC-V toolchain. Can you do a clean build and look at the build log to see which compiler and linker is being used? Are you building this in Freedom Studio?

10

A precompiled header is what you get when you try to compile a header file.

rohan:2054$ cat tmp.h
#define FOO 1
rohan:2055$ gcc -o program.elf tmp.h
rohan:2056$ file program.elf 
program.elf: GCC precompiled header (version 014) for C
rohan:2057$

This suggests an error in your build command where you accidentally tried to compile a header file instead of a source file.

Without the -o option, compiling tmp.h produces a tmp.h.gch file.

11

Replacing sifive-welcome.elf with a copy from a backup disk solve the problem. Why this file was corrupted, I don’t know…

Thank you everyone for suggestions.