Self-hosted runner

In this section you will learn how to integrate Arm Virtual Hardware into a CI/CD development flow, and automate with GitHub Actions.

Enable GitHub Actions

Open your browser, and navigate to your fork of the example repository.

Navigate to Actions. If prompted that workflows have been disabled, click I understand my workflows, go ahead and enable them button.

Create a Self-hosted Runner

Navigate to the repository Settings > Actions > Runners, and click on New self-hosted runner.

Set Runner image as Linux, and Architecture as x64 (matching the AWS instance). A set of commands will be displayed to run to prepare the runner. These commands will be unique for your account and repository.

Create a Virtual Hardware terminal copy and paste these commands to launch the runner. When configuring, you can select the default options when prompted.

The runner will report that it is Listening for Jobs.

In your browser, if you return to Settings > Actions > Runners, you will see the runner exists, and is Idle.

Modify the example sources

Return to the original terminal, and edit command_responder.cc source file for a different output message (e.g The runner heard).

    

        
        
            nano ../micro_speech/src/command_responder.cc
        
    

Update the GitHub repository

Commit and push changed file(s) to the repository

    

        
        
            git add ../micro_speech/src/command_responder.cc
git commit -m "another output message"
git push
        
    

You will be prompted for your GitHub username and Personal Access Token.

Refresh your browser and observe that your copy of the repository has been updated appropriately.

Runner starts automatically

In the AVH runner terminal, you will see that it reports Running job: ci_demonstration (and eventually Job ci_demonstration completed with result: Succeeded).

In the browser, navigate to Actions, and observe that the virtual_hardware_sh.yml workflow has started (and eventually completes). Click on ci_demonstration to see the progress of the run, and a complete log of all outputs.

Under the Run the microspeech example step, you will find the output:

    

        
        The runner heard yes (146) @1000ms
The runner heard no (145) @5600ms
...

        
    

Workflows are defined in the .github/workflows folder of the repository. See the GitHub Actions documentation for more information.

Full instructions and further examples are given in the Arm Virtual Hardware documentation .