In the very early stages of the GitHub runner charm, the charm spawned LXD virtual machines inside the same charm unit and used them to provision self-hosted GitHub runners. But as the GitHub runner charm project has progressed, we have pivoted to using OpenStack as the hypervisor to create virtual machines outside the charm unit to provide self-hosted runners. The new approach is more efficient, has higher performance, and comes with less overhead compared to the LXD-based approach. This allows us to provision thousands of self-hosted runners every day to keep up with ever-increasing demand.
Today, we are announcing the deprecation of the LXD support in the GitHub runner charm. This will free up resources that we can use to fix bugs and issues, triage feature requests, improve the performance of the GitHub runner charm, and develop the next generation of GitHub runners.
We do not expect many people are still using the LXD version of the GitHub runner charm, currently exists as the local-lxd track on Charmhub, as it hasn’t been updated for at least one year at this point. We have already reached out to the teams we are aware of that are still using the LXD version of the GitHub runner charm. But if you are still using it, please let us know and we can help you transition to the new OpenStack-based GitHub runners.
Effective today, the LXD version of the GitHub runner charm will not receive any code updates, including feature and bug-fix updates. And we will stop providing any production support for the LXD version of the GitHub runner charm after April 6, 2026.
Thank you, and we wish you a wonderful new year.