VS Code extension 26.318.11754 fails on Ubuntu 22.04 with bubblewrap 0.6.1: bwrap: Unknown option --argv0

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Mar 22, 2026 by gregorred Closed Mar 22, 2026

What version of the IDE extension are you using?

26.318.11754

What subscription do you have?

Plus

Which IDE are you using?

VS Code

What platform is your computer?

Linux 6.5.0-17-generic x86_64 x86_64

What issue are you seeing?

After updating the VS Code Codex extension to 26.318.11754, sandboxed commands stopped working on Ubuntu 22.04.

Even trivial commands fail before reaching the workspace, for example:

  • pwd
  • sed -n '1,5p' e2e/README.md
  • apply_patch

The error is consistently:

bwrap: Unknown option --argv0

From local inspection, the installed system bubblewrap is:
bubblewrap 0.6.1

That version does not support --argv0.

This makes the extension effectively unusable for normal sandboxed editing/execution because every command fails immediately at sandbox startup.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

  1. Use Ubuntu 22.04 with system bubblewrap 0.6.1.
  2. Install/update the VS Code Codex extension to 26.318.11754.
  3. Start a Codex session in any workspace.
  4. Ask Codex to run a trivial command such as pwd, or attempt a normal edit that uses apply_patch.
  5. Observe the command fails immediately with:

bwrap: Unknown option --argv0

In my case, this happened consistently for all sandboxed commands.

What is the expected behavior?

Sandboxed commands should run normally on supported Linux systems, or Codex should detect that the installed bwrap is too old and either:

  • fall back to another supported sandbox backend, or
  • show a clear actionable compatibility error

It should not make the extension unusable for basic commands on Ubuntu 22.04.

Additional information

A few details that may help:

  • bwrap --version reports bubblewrap 0.6.1
  • upstream bubblewrap added --argv0 in v0.9.0
  • rolling back the VS Code Codex extension to the previous version fixed the problem for me
  • this suggests a regression/compatibility break in the newer extension build rather than a workspace-specific issue

I also found related Linux sandbox issues in openai/codex, but I did not find one matching this exact error string:
bwrap: Unknown option --argv0

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