gem5/util/github-runners-vagrant

Setting up a Github Actions Runner with Vagrant

This directory provides a way to setup Github Actions runners using Vagrant to host them in Virtual machines.

This tutorial has been written with the assumption of running on a machine with Ubuntu 22.04. Setting up a runner on a different OS may require some changes.

Before anything else, copy this directory, "util/github-runners-vagrant", to the root of the location on your host system you wish to setup the VMs from. The CWD is assumed to be this directory.

Install Dependencies

sudo apt install vagrant
sudo apt-get build-dep vagrant ruby-libvirt
sudo apt-get install qemu libvirt-daemon-system libvirt-clients ebtables dnsmasq-base libxslt-dev libxml2-dev libvirt-dev zlib1g-dev ruby-dev

# Note: The vagrant-libvirt APT package does not work as intended. We must
# remove it from the system otherwise errors will occur (we will install it
# later using the vagrant plugin command).
sudo apt purge vagrant-libvirt

Install Vagrant Plugins

Once everything is set properly, set the VAGRANT_HOME environment variable to the directory in which the Vagrant files and other scripts are stored (i.e., the CWD). For example:

export VAGRANT_HOME=`pwd`

After this, install the relevant vagrant plugins:

vagrant plugin install dotenv
vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt
vagrant plugin install vagrant-reload

Creating the virtual machines

The Vagrantfile in this directory defines the VMs that can be built and used to create a GitHub Actions runner. This standard VM has 4-cores, 16GB of RAM, and 60GB of disk space. This is sufficient to both compile gem5 and run most simulations.

At the top of the Vagrantfile, there are a few variables that must be set prior to creating the VMs.

• NUM_RUNNERS: The number of runners to create.
• PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN: The GitHub personal access token to use. You can generate a Personal Access Token here Make sure to set admin permissions on this token.
• GITHUB_ORG: The GitHub organization to add the runners to. E.g., if the URL to your organization is https://github.com/orgs/gem5, then the variable should be set to "gem5".
• HOSTNAME : The hostname of the VM to be created (note, this will be appended with a number to create a unique hostname for each VM). E.g., if set to my-machine and the number of runners set to 2, two VMs will be created. One called my-machine-1 and the other my-machine-2.

When set simply run:

vagrant up --provider=libvirt

This should automatically create your machines then configure and start up a Github Actions runner in each. You can check the status of the runner here: https://github.com/organizations/{GITHUB_ORG}/settings/actions/runners

If the runner ever shows as offline, you can rerun the vagrant up --provider=libvirt command to make sure everything is working properly.

Troubleshooting

The default libvirt disk image storage pool is on the wrong drive

By default libvirt will store disk images in "/var/lib/libvirt/images". This is not ideal as it is on a small root partition. A solution to this is to change the default storage location. To do so, do the following:

virsh pool-list --all # Confirm here a "default" pool exist. We'll modify this.
virsh pool-dumpxml default >default-pool.xml # We take a dump of the default then removed it.
virsh pool-destroy default
virsh pool-undefine default
vim default-pool.xml # Change the image path to the desired path
virsh pool-define default-pool.xml # From here we re-add the default.
virsh pool-start default
virsh pool-autostart default

Error: "Vagrant failed to initialize at a very early stage"

W set the VAGRANT_HOME environment variable to the CWD. It's likely this has become unset The solution is simple. Within the directory containing "Vagrantfile":

VAGRANT_HOME=`pwd` vagrant <command>

You may want to set VAGRANT_HOME in your .bashrc or .zshrc.