Over the last couple of years, Arm’s CI/CD ecosystem has grown significantly with all mainstream CI tools now supporting Arm architecture. This includes Travis CI as one of the leading and most popular CI tools among the open source community for building and testing open source software projects for public repositories.
Since Travis CI’s announcement of Arm64 support back in Oct. 2019, Travis CI has experienced multi-fold growth for Arm-based builds with:
While hundreds of open source projects are building and testing for Arm64 on Travis CI, some of the notable projects are Apache httpd, Apache Tomcat, QEMU, syslog-ng, ISA-L, pmem, and Facebook RocksDB.
Travis CI offers support for Arm64 builds on AWS Graviton2 and Equinix Metal Arm-based cloud platforms, which offer developers two virtualization environments for Linux builds: LXD containers and full VMs (depending on the use case). LXD containers offer faster spin-up times and can dynamically assign more computing power (when available) to increase build speed. Full VM environments offer HugePages and privileged filesystem access support with a fixed number of CPUs and memory. For more details on these two environments, refer to the Travis Build Environment overview documentation. Developers simply modify their open-source project’s YAML file to use the appropriate cloud platform and associated environment without having to worry about setting-up/provisioning Arm64 hardware.
In November 2020, Travis CI introduced changes to its build plans for travis-ci.com users. This move followed significant misuse of Travis CI’s free infrastructure offering by cryptocurrency miners. As a result of this change, users building on public repositories across all architectures were required to contact Travis CI support to request open source credits. However, this month Travis CI enabled a Partner Queue Solution which removes this extra step for developers building for public repositories. We have worked closely with the Travis CI team to ensure continued seamless access for developers to utilize this Zero-Credit Queue Partner Solution. For more information on how to build for Arm architecture, refer to the building on multiple CPU architectures guide on the Travis CI website.
“Open source has always been at the core of what Travis CI stands for, and we have witnessed developers increasingly choose to deploy their software applications on Arm architecture for cloud to edge solutions.” said Paul Gordon, Marketing Lead at Travis CI. “We are excited to launch our Partner Queue Solution in collaboration with Arm and its partners, and we invite open source projects to continue building, testing, and deploying for Arm architecture through a more frictionless developer experience.”
Travis CI and Arm look forward to continued engagement with the open-source community as we support its needs by offering best-in-class tools and infrastructure. Happy building.