I think I would have eventually just loaded up a debugger and binary searched the codebase until I found the spot returning the error.
But yeah, I was just being lazy and dumb. I solved it within ten minutes of someone saying "why don't you just go through the binfmt_elf code?" A debugger would've probably been more tedious than reading the relevant code directly, but would've been just as effective.
Unless the other os and debugger mentioned has an easy way to do it with a machine that's not virtualized?
Plan 9’s debugger Acid can attach to a running kernel on a remote machine and debug it.
dzdt•1h ago