Continuous Integration (CI)🔗

The vAccel project uses a Kubernetes-native, multi-architecture CI infrastructure designed for reliability, scalability, and reuse across all repositories in the ecosystem. CI is built around GitHub Actions, self-hosted runners, and reusable workflows.

Architecture Overview🔗

• Runner Orchestration: Self-hosted runners are managed using GitHub Actions Runner Controller (ARC) on a K3s cluster.
• Provisioning: VMs are dynamically spawned via Incus on x86_64 and arm64 bare-metal nodes.
• Bootstrap: Each VM joins the cluster on boot and registers as a member to the joint K3s control plane.

Supported Runner Tags🔗

CI Directory Structure🔗

Each repository in the vAccel ecosystem uses a standardized .github/ layout:

.github/actions/🔗

Reusable GitHub Actions for CI tasks.
Example: build

• Modular and script-driven
• Automatically handles multi-arch builds
• Plugin-agnostic logic (based on meson)

.github/workflows/🔗

Top-level workflows that coordinate testing, building, and artifact handling.

• [pr-build-and-verify.yml]

  Triggers on each pull request and performs:

  • Linting
  • Architecture-specific builds
  • Example (end-to-end tests) execution (via run_examples.sh)
  • Artifact staging

• [verify-build.yml]

  A reusable workflow invoked by other repos to validate builds with standardized steps.

Testing Strategy🔗

All repositories in the vAccel ecosystem include a run_examples.sh script, which is used to:

• Set up required runtime environments
• Run only the relevant examples per context
• Validate outputs and detect regressions

These are invoked automatically by the workflows during CI runs, ensuring both core framework and plugin-specific coverage.

Artifact Publishing🔗

On main branch merges and tagged releases:

• Binaries (DEBs, TARs, .so, etc.) are compiled for supported architectures
• Files are uploaded to a secure, versioned S3-compatible object storage
• Downstream components reference artifacts using semantic versions

This approach enables:

• Binary-only integrations on resource-constrained platforms
• Secure and reproducible builds

Example diagram🔗

flowchart TD
        PR[Pull Request]
        Merge[Merge to main]
    subgraph ARC[Arc Controller]
        Runners --> RunnerTag1[Runner Set]
        Runners --> RunnerTag2[Runner Set]
        RunnerTag1 --> x86
        RunnerTag1 --> arm64
        RunnerTag1 --> arm
        RunnerTag2 --> x86
        RunnerTag2 --> arm64
        RunnerTag2 --> arm
    end
    subgraph Build
        BuildCode
    end
    subgraph Verify
        VerifyCode --> LintCode
        VerifyCode --> LintScripts
        VerifyCode --> LintDocs
    end
    subgraph Upload
        UploadBin[Upload Binaries]
    end
    PR --> ARC --> Build --> Verify --> Upload
    Merge --> ARC --> Build --> Upload