vscode-sysroot

Allows VS Code 1.99+ to run on legacy systems.

A sysroot with glibc 2.28 and kernel 3.10 is built using crosstool-ng in Docker, following the unofficial instructions with some modifications. patchelf is also installed into the sysroot. Once it is copied to the remote system, and the proper environment variables are set up, the server will patch itself on startup.

This is confirmed to work on CentOS 7.9 / RHEL 7.9 / Oracle Linux 7.9. It may work on Ubuntu 18.04, but see below.

Instructions

• Ensure you have a working Docker installation
• Use make to build a sysroot tarball in toolchain/
• Copy toolchain/vscode-sysroot-x86_64-linux-gnu.tgz to the remote legacy server
• Untar the sysroot into ~/.vscode-server/sysroot on the remote
  • tar zxf vscode-sysroot-x86_64-linux-gnu.tgz -C ~/.vscode-server
• Copy sysroot.sh to ~/.vscode-server/sysroot.sh on the remote server
• source ~/.vscode-server/sysroot.sh from your .bashrc or other login script

Now connect to your remote server in VS Code, and in the Output > Remote - SSH tab, you will see Patching glibc and Patching linker just after Starting server.... Any error output is also visible in this tab.

Ubuntu 18.04

On Ubuntu 18.04, which uses kernel 4.15 or later, this config is untested but may work as-is. However, you might have to change the following versions to "4.15" (or later) in x86_64-gcc-8.5.0-glibc-2.28.config. In Microsoft's example, they are set to exactly 4.19.287. If you confirm this either way, please open an issue with your findings.

  CT_LINUX_VERSION="3.10"
  CT_GLIBC_MIN_KERNEL="3.10"