Instruction at Address 0x000000 crashes

Need help: a dynamically linked program crashes at address 0x0, IMHO the first executable instruction of the code. The program is cross-compiled using gcc:

arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc -v
Using built-in specs.
COLLECT_GCC=arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc
COLLECT_LTO_WRAPPER=/opt/cross/libexec/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabi/7.2.0/lto-wrapper
Target: arm-linux-gnueabi
Configured with: ../configure --prefix=/opt/cross --enable-bootstrap=no --build=x86_64-suse-linux --target=arm-linux-gnueabi --enable-languages=c,c++ --with-float=soft --disable-libmudflap --disable-multilib --with-cpu=arm7tdmi --with-float=soft
Thread model: posix
gcc version 7.2.0 (GCC)

Executing the program under gdb results in an immediate segmentation fault:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.

0x00000000 in ?? ()

(gdb) info registers    
r0             0x0      0
r1             0xbefff767       3204446055    
r2             0x0      0    
r3             0x2a017000       704737280    
r4             0x0      0    
r5             0x0      0    
r6             0x0      0    
r7             0x0      0    
r8             0x0      0    
r9             0x0      0    
r10            0x0      0    
r11            0x0      0    
r12            0x0      0    
sp             0xbefff640       0xbefff640
lr             0x0      0    
pc             0x0      0x0    
cpsr           0x60000010       1610612752

The executable file: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, not stripped

The libraries reside in the common path (/lib/).

The target system uname -a: Linux nanoPi 3.4.39-h3 #12 SMP PREEMPT Thu Mar 23 15:51:07 CST 2017 armv7l armv7l armv7l GNU/Linux

compile options: arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc -std=c99 -D_GNU_SOURCE=1 -D_POSIX_SOURCE=1 (... some source files ...) -O0 -g3 -pedantic -pedantic-errors -Wall -Wextra -Wconversion -c -fmessage-length=0 -MMD -MP -MF"src/options.d" -MT"src/options.o" -o "src/options.o" "../src/options.c"

Linking statically, the program works as intended.

I'm stuck on this issue for some hours now, running out of ideas what to try or where to look further. Google search mostly returns references to dereferencing Null Pointers, but I think that this is a different case.

Any hint appreciated.