you can run the example by providing a path to the arm-linux-gnueabi shared libs using the -L flag.

qemu-arm -L /usr/arm-linux-gnueabi/

also make sure the LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not set.

unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Prefix the LD_LIBRARY_PATH with /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf: (or just set it to /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf if it's empty on the line invoking the executable:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf qemu-arm bin

That should allow the executable to find the file.

after installing libc6-armhf-cross

sudo ln -s /usr/arm-linux-gnueabihf/lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 /usr/lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 or update the library path

You need to install the relevant C library. Since Parrot OS is based on Debian, and provides arm64 binaries, the following should work:

• Enable the arm64 architecture (this matches aarch64):

  sudo dpkg --add-architecture arm64
  

• Update the local repository caches:

  sudo apt update
  

• Install the arm64 C library:

  sudo apt install libc6:arm64
  

This will fail if your system isn’t up-to-date, so you may need to run sudo apt upgrade first. If a.out needs other libraries, you’ll need to install the corresponding :arm64 packages too.

It looks like the system is not able to find the dynamic linker (which in your case appears to be /system/bin/linker, rather than the the normal /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 or similar.

Since I don't have access to your code, I've tried to reproduce this by mounting a Raspberry Pi "Raspbian" image on /mnt on my system. If I try to run /mnt/bin/echo hello, like this:

qemu-arm  /mnt/bin/echo hello

I get a similar error:

/lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3: No such file or directory

I can provide an explicit path to the dynamic linker like this:

qemu-arm  /mnt/lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 /mnt/bin/echo hello

Now I get a different error:

/mnt/bin/echo: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

That's actually great, because that is a normal "I can't find my shared libraries" error, and the solution is to use LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Rather than setting this in our environment, we can set this in the environment created by qemu-arm with the -E flag:

qemu-arm -E LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/mnt/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/  /mnt/lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 /mnt/bin/echo hello

Which gets me the output:

hello

I suspect that these same two techniques -- providing an explicit path to the linker, and providing an explicit library search path in LD_LIBRARY_PATH -- may help you out. Let me know how it works!

Yes, you can run x86 binaries in QEmu with QEmu running on an ARM processor. It will be very slow, because QEmu does software emulation of the x86 processor, and you may find yourself short of RAM, but it can work.

The qemu-user package contains the virtual machine itself, i.e. an emulator of an x86 processor and some hardware devices and a Linux kernel running on that harwdare. (The qemu-system package contains an emulator of just the hardware on which you can install the operating system of your choice.) You still need to populate the virtual machine with a runtime environment, including /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (the dynamic loader, necessary to run any dynamically linked executable) and a bunch of libraries. This is what the qemu-libc-i386 package on Optware provides. It is somewhat similar to ia32-libs on amd64 systems, but that is a lot simpler because an amd64 processor can execute i386 binaries natively; here you need to have the libraries inside the x86 VM.

You can try grabbing the qemu-libc-i386 package from Optware. The Optware package format is very close to Debian's, so you can convert the ipk to a deb manually:

mkdir tmp
wget http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/unstable/qemu-libc-i386_2.3.6-1_arm.ipk
tar xzf qemu-libc-i386_2.3.6-1_arm.ipk
ar rc qemu-libc-i386_2.3.6-1_arm.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz 

I don't guarantee that this will work. You'll may need to ensure that the versions of QEmu match.

If installing the modified ipk doesn't work, try reproducing its contents on your system. Unpack data.tar.gz somewhere (or get the same files from some other x86 system), see what the postinst script in control.tar.gz does, and supply the proper paths to qemu-i386.

@Darkmalex It looks like it isn't picking up the sysroot stuff properly.

Since I can see it passes --sysroot to g++ I'm guessing your sysroot/lib directory doesn't have the proper libraries in it.

What is the result of file /mnt/elvees-rootfs/lib/libc.so.6? And can you show ls -lh /mnt/elvees-rootfs/lib?

Edit: also maybe try dropping the trailing / on your sysroot path (shouldn't matter but sometimes does). And maybe add -gcc-sysroot to your configure line (should be defaulted to yes, but can't hurt to force it).

Compile the application on such multi-arch system, patch the interp for it (patchelf --set-interpreter /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 /usr/local/bin/openocd) if You cannot. Or call the dynamically linked binary explicitly through the corresponding dynamic linker (/lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 /usr/local/bin/openocd). You could do the last by wrappping the command name in a script or alias and move the acutal binary out of the way.