Add initial support for Windows arm64

[dennisameling]

I wanted to test if it's possible to cross-compile GitHub Actions for Windows arm64, turns out it works! 🚀

Here's an example release with the arm64 binaries: https://github.com/dennisameling/runner/releases/tag/v2.273.6-win-arm64

UPDATE December 28 2020: rebased against the recent .NET 5 upgrade. New release: https://github.com/dennisameling/runner/releases/tag/v2.275.1-win-arm64 - confirmed to work on Surface Pro X including the RunnerService 👍🏼

I was even able to add a self-hosted runner on my Surface Pro X with the arm64 binaries:

Running as a Windows service also works:

I know I haven't discussed this in a Feature Request here before to ask for the feature, but would appreciate if the team wants to consider this PR. It would bring Windows arm64 to a pre-release state, just like Linux arm64 and arm.

Thanks in advance!

[TingluoHuang]

what is unoffical-builds? is that trusted?

[dennisameling]

The NodeJS Build team can't currently publish official builds for Windows arm64 yet due to missing Hosted ARM64 runners (tracked in nodejs/build#2450 (comment)). Because of this, the NodeJS Build team is currently providing unofficial builds at that URL.

Compilation support for ARM64 is at Tier 2, meaning that they will only release new versions if NodeJS is guaranteed to compile on arm64.

[bryanmacfarlane]

Would the existing node we package work on the windows arm64 through an emulation layer?

[dennisameling]

@bryanmacfarlane it would indeed, however it would result in a loss of performance and process.arch would also return x64 in that case. We should actually be very close to official arm64 builds, so may I suggest that we wait 2-3 more weeks? Otherwise I'm happy to update this PR to use x64 Node until the native version becomes available.

[TingluoHuang]

@chrispat @thejoebourneidentity for this.

[dscho]

Shouldn't this be upper-case ARM, i.e. ARM64 instead of arm64?

[jeremyd2019]

This has worked pretty well for me for making a Raspberry Pi Windows ARM64 runner. Fast it ain't, but it's better than the nothing that's available in hosted runners. I just had to rebase and rebuild (CI) because a new version was released and auto-update failure (not finding a windows-arm64 version) was apparently fatal. Upgrading from a 3B+ to a 4B 8GB model with a USB3 flash drive has really helped with speed.

[dennisameling]

Yep, had the same issue where the auto-update process got in a loop. Just rebased and rebuilt it as well, and it's once again running really well on my Surface Pro X 🚀

[jeremyd2019]

Time for another rebase, my runner quit on me again 😖

One minor issue I see is that the CI job "Package Release" step results in "Packaging actions-runner-win-x64-2.280.2" on arm64, and the zip file inside the artifact zip says x64.

$ unzip runner-package-win-arm64.zip
Archive:  runner-package-win-arm64.zip
  inflating: actions-runner-win-x64-2.280.2.zip

[dennisameling]

@jeremyd2019 When building on an x64 host the following works for me:

./dev layout Release win-arm64
./dev package Release win-arm64

It simply creates actions-runner-win-arm64-2.280.2.zip with the correct binaries in it. Note that building on arm64 might have unintended side-effects since a native arm64 SDK is available only in .NET 5 and higher - the runner runs on .NET Core 3 at the moment of writing. Though I actually think it should work when installing the .NET Core 3 SDK x86 or x64 on arm64 (leveraging Windows' emulation).

[jeremyd2019]

@jeremyd2019 When building on an x64 host the following works for me:

./dev layout Release win-arm64
./dev package Release win-arm64

I see.

runner/.github/workflows/build.yml

Line 64 in 04679b5

${{ matrix.devScript }} package Release

Needs ${{ matrix.runtime }} arg like release.yml has

runner/.github/workflows/release.yml

Line 99 in 04679b5

${{ matrix.devScript }} package Release ${{ matrix.runtime }}

[ntindle]

Hello,

is this scheduled for review by the actions team?

[jeremyd2019]

rebasing onto v2.285.0 finally got a conflict, because they added node16 support. And it looks like the unofficial build for 12.22.7 for windows-arm64 is not there ☹️ Nor is 16.13.0

[dennisameling]

Have just rebased. The code is now ready for the situation where the NodeJS team will be publishing official ARM64 builds, which hopefully will be happening soon: nodejs/build#2540

[jeremyd2019]

As a workaround for the time being, it seems the server is not trying to force my runner to update if it is registered as ephemeral (despite #1396 not being done yet). And I've read on other issues that you can just lie in your runner's version as something greater than the released version, and that will make the auto-update STFU. But I'd much rather actually be able to keep my ARM64 runner up-to-date.

[jeremyd2019]

It looks like this has finally been done in https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/tag/v2.297.0 (#2022). I had been rebasing this against new releases of the runner to keep my runner going, but now I can try out the "official" unofficial build! 🎉

[thboop]

Closing this out in favor of the official unofficial builds, but thanks for all teh work you've done here @jeremyd2019 . Let us know if you see any issues in the "official" release