refs #11199 attempt to test on windows arm64

[alex]

No description provided.

[alex]

this is now blocked until actions/partner-runner-images#77

[khmyznikov]

@alex hey there! Is rust toolchain is only blocker here?

[alex]

It's the current blocker. Hacking around that limitation (which we will not merge) produces a segfault, but I have no intent of debugging that until Microsoft resolves the toolchain limitation.

[alex]

Good news, we now have Rust in the windows image. Bad news is that we're experiencing segfaults.

openssl/openssl#26239 indicates there was at least one known issue.

Unfortunately, https://github.com/actions/partner-runner-images/blob/main/images/arm-windows-11-image.md doesn't document what software versions are in what image versions.

[reaperhulk]

Looks like it is indeed outdated. Visual Studio 2022 Developer Command Prompt v17.13.2

So now we wait some indeterminate amount of time for arm to update their images again. I have serious qualms with depending on these partner images given how poorly they're executing on this.

[alex]

filed actions/partner-runner-images#113

[khmyznikov]

The fix for OpenSSL should arrive hopefully next week

[alex]

Great to hear. It would be extremely helpful if things like this were communicated/visible in the official repo.

[khmyznikov]

@alex Sure! I’ll make an effort to improve communication. The new image should already be available.

[alex]

rustup appears to now be missing from the image

[khmyznikov]

@alex they asked to try once again and they'll reach out to GH team to see if there's any other issues with the runners. Meanwhile, here is a PR for changes: https://github.com/actions/partner-runner-images/pull/116/files

[reaperhulk]

That package information is a major improvement, but ideally arm would move to doing GH releases that contain that data + information about what has changed much like the GH-owned images do (e.g., https://github.com/actions/runner-images/releases/tag/macos-14-arm64%2F20250723.1691). Do you know if that's the intent?

As is, we have a situation where Arm is providing images that aren't consistent with GH's own, doesn't accurately list information about the software manifest on them, makes it nearly impossible to tell what has changed, appears to have regressions that are suggestive of automation issues, and updates them more slowly than GH does. All of this makes us reluctant to depend on them.

[alex]

rustup is still not installed (or not on the PATH)

[khmyznikov]

@reaperhulk the update frequency was slow initially due to a few internal certification issues, but these were resolved and shouldn't impact future releases. Currently, a different team from Arm manages the images, as they have more expertise in this area (Arm) compared to the regular engineering team.

Thanks for providing this feedback, I'll ensure everything is taken into consideration, and the process will be improved to meet everyone's expectations.