[macOS] Apple Silicon (M1) powered macOS runners are now available in public beta!

[Steve-Glass]

Breaking changes

To try the new Apple silicon macOS larger runner, update the runs-on: key in your GitHub Actions YAML workflow YAML file to target macos-latest-xlarge or macos-13-xlarge. The 12-core macOS larger runner is moving from xlarge to large, and is still available by updating the runs-on: key to macos-latest-large, macos-12-large, or macos-13-large. There is no sign-up required for the beta and the runner is immediately available to all developers, teams, and enterprises.

• Blog Post
• Documentation
• Pricing

Target date

N/A

The motivation for the changes

N/A

Possible impact

N/A

Platforms affected

• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Actions

Runner images affected

• Ubuntu 20.04
• Ubuntu 22.04
• macOS 11
• macOS 12
• macOS 13
• Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server 2022

Mitigation ways

N/A

[jjerphan]

Thank you for providing Apple Silicon macOS runners! 🙌

[jpomykala]

Yes! 🙌

[oscarsj]

Thanks for the hard work, this will be incredible useful for Code Scanning pipelines! ❤️
One question @Steve-Glass, what's the status of SIP (System Integrity Protection) on these runners, is it enabled or disabled?

Thanks all the team again for making this happen so timely!

[letmaik]

Will M1 runners be available for free for public projects? I just tried to use it and got:

The job was not started because recent account payments have failed or your spending limit needs to be increased. Please check the 'Billing & plans' section in your settings.

[fkorotkov]

Why the VM has access to only 6 out of 8 M1 cores? Genuinely curious because a lot of Tart users use it for managing VMs for self-hosted GitHub Actions Runners. So far there were no reports from people running VMs that fully utilize cores and memory of M1/M2 chips. I wonder if you found some macOS/Actions limitation in your extensive private beta testing?

[joeyparrish]

It seems M1 is currently tied to the "large" or "XL" runners for a fee. Will there be small M1 runners available for free for public projects?

[DelevoXDG]

Seems like the Android NDK is missing in the new runner: https://github.com/actions/runner-images/blob/375e9a1c270ec81a3ffd5b429dcdee9508b46124/images/macos/macos-13-arm64-Readme.md

Are you planning to add it?

[kgantchev]

Hi all... you can use FlyCI's M1 and M2 runners. Our runners are on average 2x faster and 2x cheaper than GitHub's.

Install Instructrions

1. Install the FlyCI GitHub app.
2. Modify the runs-on directive in workflow files as demonstrated in this PR.
3. Enjoy 2x faster and 2x cheaper MacOS workflow runs!

Easily replace GitHub's runners:

jobs:
 ci:
-    runs-on: macos-latest
+    runs-on: flyci-macos-large-latest-m2
   steps:
   - name: 👀 Checkout repo
     uses: actions/checkout@v4

If your repo is public, then FlyCI offers 500 mins/month of free M1 runner usage with the flyci-macos-large-latest-m1 runner.

Best Regards,
Kiril Gantchev
CEO and co-founder of FlyCI

[yurijmikhalevich]

@joeyparrish, GitHub Actions added support for macos-14, which is Apple Silicon and available for free to the public repositories.

github/roadmap#926
https://github.com/actions/runner-images?tab=readme-ov-file#available-images

[joeyparrish]

Thanks! I have already started using it.