@knc1: Probably because I didn't want to rebuild it a second time with the appropriate workarounds in place for the K3 build, whereas I was already building elfutils for strace/ltrace

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But, yeah, that's a pretty decent alternative to the whole K3 mess on that front

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EDIT: That, and, more to the point, since I'm doing a cross-build, the binutils binaries I have are cross, too (i.e., x86_64 targeting arm).
My actual sysroot is pretty bare with ct-ng, basically just libc & libstdc++.