I am trying to follow Linux From Scratch 9.1 guide and am facing symbolic links issues running gcc and other applications from lfs user

when I run gcc from lfs user I get the following error,
gcc: error trying to exec 'as': execvp: Too many levels of symbolic links

but when I run as sudo I am able to execute any commands including gcc successfully, I have chowned both my /usr/lfs/sources and /usr/lfs/tools directory using chown -v as given in the lfs book
the output of ls -la / is attached herewith. kindly help me resolve this issue.
Quote:

lfs@narayan-Inspiron-3543:~$ ls -la / total 112 drwxr-xr-x 25 lfs root 4096 Apr 3 17:03 . drwxr-xr-x 25 lfs root 4096 Apr 3 17:03 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 3 16:55 bin drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Apr 4 13:06 boot drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 2 10:28 cdrom drwxr-xr-x 20 root root 4580 Apr 4 13:59 dev drwxr-xr-x 125 root root 12288 Apr 3 17:05 etc drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Apr 2 18:14 home lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Apr 3 17:03 initrd.img -> boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-45-generic lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Apr 2 10:26 initrd.img.old -> boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-28-generic drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4096 Apr 2 10:41 lib drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 3 23:52 lib64 drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Apr 2 10:26 lost+found drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 2 10:48 media drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 2 14:07 mnt drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 2 11:04 opt dr-xr-xr-x 300 root root 0 Apr 4 13:07 proc drwx------ 5 root root 4096 Apr 2 22:08 root drwxr-xr-x 31 root root 860 Apr 4 13:09 run drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12288 Apr 3 16:55 sbin drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Apr 2 10:56 snap drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 2 13:45 sources drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 3 23:52 srv dr-xr-xr-x 13 root root 0 Apr 4 13:07 sys drwxrwxrwt 17 root root 4096 Apr 4 14:02 tmp lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 Apr 2 18:13 tools -> /tools drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 Apr 2 13:38 usr drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Feb 4 00:00 var lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Apr 3 17:03 vmlinuz -> boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-45-generic lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Apr 3 17:03 vmlinuz.old -> boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-28-generic

Kindly note that I have partitioned my ubuntu 18.04 during installation and I am working on a separate dedicated partition mounted on /usr/lfs instead of /mnt/lfs which I have seen usually, I have included this info as I am not really aware whether this would be causing my present issue. Thanks in advance