CI Refactor: Bifurcation and Runner Optimization (Proposals A & B)

[Coldaine]

Overview

This issue tracks the completion of a comprehensive CI pipeline refactor designed to optimize resource usage, fix self-hosted runner environment incompatibilities, and increase feedback speed.

Changes Implemented

1. Runner Bifurcation

Workloads have been strictly separated based on hardware requirements:

• GitHub-Hosted (ubuntu-latest): Now handles all stateless, high-parallelism tasks.

  • lint: cargo fmt and cargo clippy (Parallelized)
  • build: Workspace compilation and cargo doc (Parallelized)
  • security_audit: cargo-deny and cargo-audit
  • unit_tests: Headless tests excluding GUI/Injection crates
  • release / release-plz: Moved off self-hosted as they are stateless

• Self-Hosted (Fedora/Nobara): Reserved exclusively for hardware-dependent tests.

  • hardware_integration: Real display, audio, and clipboard tests.
  • stt_e2e: Heavy integration tests (Moonshine/Golden Master) requiring GPU/caching.

2. Environment Fixes (Proposal B)

• Removed Xvfb: The self-hosted runner was identified as running a live KDE Plasma session. The previous xvfb-action (which used apt-get) was causing failures on Fedora and conflicting with the real display. Tests now use the live DISPLAY.
• Dependency Gating: Hardware tests now explicitly depend on lint and build success to prevent wasting limited self-hosted runner cycles on failing code.

3. Optimizations (Proposal A)

• Caching & Performance:
  • Enabled sccache (10GB limit) and mold linker on self-hosted.
  • Enabled CARGO_INCREMENTAL=1 for self-hosted.
  • Configured persistent rust-cache keys.
• Consolidation:
  • Inlined setup-whisper-dependencies to reduce scheduling overhead.
  • Merged runner-test into runner-diagnostic and deleted the redundant file.
  • Deleted validate-workflows (redundant with GitHub's native checks).

Verification

• Local Smoke Test: scripts/local_ci.sh mirrors the new hosted standard_checks.
• Self-Hosted Validation: A new step "Validate live display environment" runs before tests to confirm X11/Wayland accessibility.