how to configure clang-tidy in a complicated cross-compile build environment

[elbrandt]

Hi, we have a somewhat complicated build environment, and I'd like some advice on the best way to configure clang-tidy within VSCode C_cpp tools.

Here is the situation:

• Our project builds using CMake and the VSCode CMake extension.
• Our project builds on x86_64 host machine, and we build for two targets:
  • GCC 7.5.0 x86_64-linux-gnu
  • GCC 7.5.0 aarch64-linux-gnu
• we are using clang-tidy-10
• this is all on a ubu18.04 WSL, and none of the above tools can be updated to newer versions for various reasons.
  • VSCode 1.85.2
  • C_Cpp v1.21.6

When we have vscode + cmake configured for the native x86_64 build, we get zero warnings from clang-tidy using the configuration provided below.

However, when we set the active cmake target to be the aarch64 cross compile, our clang-tidy blows up with errors shown below.

We would be fine with configuring clang-tidy to always do its analysis based on x86_64, regardless of the target architecture of the build

How can we configure clang-tidy in VS code to do what we want (get the same analysis whether we are building native x86_64 or cross compiling for aarch64?

(we've experimented with "--extra-arg=--target=aarch64" in the clang-tidy args, and toggling useBuildPath both ways, with no success, it just seems to push the problem around to slightly different output of header/include warnings).

Thanks in advance!
-Eric.

relevant VSCode/Clang-tidy config from workspace settings.json:

    "C_Cpp.loggingLevel": "Debug",
    "C_Cpp.default.cppStandard": "c++17",
    "C_Cpp.codeAnalysis.clangTidy.useBuildPath": true,
    "C_Cpp.codeAnalysis.clangTidy.enabled": true,
    "C_Cpp.codeAnalysis.exclude": {
        "externals/**": true,
        "build/**": true
    },
    "C_Cpp.codeAnalysis.clangTidy.path": "/usr/bin/clang-tidy-10",
    "C_Cpp.codeAnalysis.clangTidy.args": [
        "--extra-arg=-mno-sse2",
    ],

Clang-tidy gives zero warnings when building x86_64.
Clang-tidy warnings that we get when cross compiling for aarch64 (mostly are missing headers):

'bits/c++config.h' file not found
'sys/cdefs.h' file not found
... etc