GitHub ARM64 runners are now available

[manics]

What docker image(s) is this feature applicable to?

docker-stacks-foundation

What change(s) are you proposing?

The macOS 14 runner image is now available for GitHub hosted runners. Workflows executed on this image will run exclusively on the 3 vCPU M1 runner announced earlier today.

https://github.blog/changelog/2024-01-30-github-actions-macos-14-sonoma-is-now-available/

If it works it'd avoid the cost of self-hosted runners?

How does this affect the user?

No impact on users

Anything else?

No response

[manics]

Actually scratch that... it's OS X so it's probably not worth the effort of installing Docker.

[mathbunnyru]

@manics I actually think it's worth trying to use these new runners.

If it works it'd avoid the cost of self-hosted runners?

Yes, there are other advantages as well though:

• no need to think about the security of our runners (currently I manually run build workflow for outside contributors)
• no need to think about cleaning up docker state and other states
• faster builds
• more concurrent builds
• less code for setting up the runner (I think most popular actions will support new runners quite soon)
• we will be testing the build process on macOS (even though I've been building on macOS 99% of the time)

So, there are definitely some good things about having native aarch64 runners (even if they're macOS).
That's why I think it's definitely worth it to try these runners.

@manics what do you think?

[manics]

No harm trying!

[mathbunnyru]

Unfortunately, it's not gonna work for us 😢

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-github-hosted-runners/about-larger-runners/about-larger-runners#limitations-for-macos-larger-runners

Due to a limitation of Apple's Virtualization Framework, which our hypervisor uses, nested-virtualization is not supported by arm64 runners.

We might receive Linux aarch64 runners one day, or M2 processors (I am not 100% sure they will work), but unfortunately, I am closing this now.