GitLab CI shared runners only provide a docker environment running on Linux. While it is possible to provide private runners for non-Linux platforms this is not something most contributors/maintainers will wish to do.
To work around this limitation, we take advantage of Cirrus CI's free offering: more specifically, we use the cirrus-run script to trigger Cirrus CI jobs from GitLab CI jobs so that Cirrus CI job output is integrated into the main GitLab CI pipeline dashboard.
There is, however, some one-time setup required. If you want FreeBSD and macOS builds to happen when you push to your GitLab repository, you need to
set up a GitHub repository for the project, eg.
yourusername/qemu. This repository needs to exist for cirrus-run to work, but it doesn't need to be kept up to date, so you can create it and then forget about it;enable the Cirrus CI GitHub app for your GitHub account;
sign up for Cirrus CI. It's enough to log into the website using your GitHub account;
grab an API token from the Cirrus CI settings page;
it may be necessary to push an empty
.cirrus.ymlfile to your github fork for Cirrus CI to properly recognize the project. You can check whether Cirrus CI knows about your project by navigating to:https://cirrus-ci.com/yourusername/qemuin the CI/CD / Variables section of the settings page for your GitLab repository, create two new variables:
CIRRUS_GITHUB_REPO, containing the name of the GitHub repository created earlier, eg.yourusername/qemu;CIRRUS_API_TOKEN, containing the Cirrus CI API token generated earlier. This variable must be marked as Masked, because anyone with knowledge of it can impersonate you as far as Cirrus CI is concerned.
Neither of these variables should be marked as Protected, because in general you'll want to be able to trigger Cirrus CI builds from non-protected branches.
Once this one-time setup is complete, you can just keep pushing to your GitLab repository as usual and you'll automatically get the additional CI coverage.