Cross Platform Action 0.25.0

Summary

Version 0.25.0 brings several enhancements, deprecations, and support updates. Key changes include added support for new operating systems and deprecation of certain features. Below is a detailed overview of the changes.

New Features

• Support for FreeBSD 14.1: This release includes support for FreeBSD 14.1, extending compatibility with this new version of the operating system.
• Support for NetBSD 9.4: Added support for NetBSD 9.4 to ensure compatibility and performance improvements on this system.

Deprecations

• macOS Runners: Deprecation of support for macOS runners, due to the transition to ARM64 architecture for the latest macOS versions. Users are advised to switch to supported environments.
• hypervisor Input Parameter: The hypervisor input parameter has been deprecated. Users should update their configurations accordingly.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all contributors and users for their feedback and support. Special thanks to Jacob Carlborg for his ongoing efforts and contributions to this release.

For a detailed list of changes, please refer to the changelog on our repository.

Cross Platform Action 0.24.0

Added

• Add support for FreeBSD 13.3
• Add support for NetBSD 10.0
• Add support for NetBSD ARM64 (#55)
• Add support for OpenBSD 7.5 (openbsd-builder#16)

Cross Platform Action 0.23.0

Added

• Add support for FreeBSD 14.0 (#74)
• Add post run step that prints the VM output
• Support hardware accelerated virtualization on Linux runners (#47)

Fixed

• OpenBSD VM fails during "Initializing VM" with QEMU on macOS (#73)
• Use same options for rsync in both directions (#76)

Changed

• Update qemu to 8.2.0 for CVTPS2PD fix (#78)

Other

It's now recommended to use Linux runners. Since the upgrade [1] of the Linux runners, they now support hardware accelerated virtualization. The upgrade also comes with more resources resulting in having better performance than the macOS runners.

[1] https://github.blog/2024-01-17-github-hosted-runners-double-the-power-for-open-source/

Cross Platform Action 0.22.0

Added

• Added support for using the action in multiple steps in the same job (#26).
  All the inputs need to be the same for all steps, except for the following
  inputs: sync_files, shutdown_vm and run.

• Added support for specifying that the VM should not shutdown after the action
  has run. This adds a new input parameter: shutdown_vm. When set to false,
  this will hopefully mitigate very frequent freezing of VM during teardown (#61, #72).

Changed

• Always terminate VM instead of shutting down. This is more efficient and this
  will hopefully mitigate very frequent freezing of VM during teardown
  (#61, #72).

• Use unsafe as the cache mode for QEMU disks. This should improve performance (#67).

Cross Platform Action 0.21.1

Fixed

• FreeBSD jobs occasionally fail when ejecting the disk (#64)

Cross Platform Action 0.21.0

Added

• Add support for OpenBSD 7.4 (openbsd-builder#15)

Cross Platform Action 0.20.0

Added

• Add support for disabling file syncing (#65). This adds a new input parameter, sync_files. It allows to specify which directions files should be synced. From the runner to the VM, from the VM to the runner, both or none.

Cross Platform Action 0.19.1

Fixed

• NetBSD - VM doesn't start (#62)

Cross Platform Action 0.19.0

Changed

• VMs running via QEMU only expose SSE and SSE2 CPU features (#60).
  This changes the machine to q35 and the cpu to max, for x86-64 using
  the QEMU hypervisor. This adds more CPU features like AVX and AVX2.

Cross Platform Action 0.18.0

Added

• Add support for custom image URLs (#13)
• Add architecture alias for x86-64: x64 (#58)