GitHub-hosted macos-14 is the M1 standard runner (3 vCPU, 7 GB RAM,
14 GB storage) and is FREE for public repositories per the GitHub
Actions billing reference. Larger variants (macos-14-large,
macos-14-xlarge) are billed; we deliberately avoid those.
unslothai/unsloth and unslothai/unsloth-zoo are both public, so
adding a single macos-14 job to MLX CI costs zero minutes against
the org's billing quota while closing the only remaining gap the
spoofed Linux job cannot reach: the actual Apple Silicon dispatch
path. Specifically the new mlx-real-apple-silicon job:
- Installs the real mlx and mlx-lm packages from PyPI.
- Verifies platform.system()=='Darwin' and platform.machine()=='arm64'
naturally, with no monkeypatch.
- Imports unsloth and asserts unsloth._IS_MLX is True so the gate
flips on real hardware as it is supposed to.
- Smoke-imports every PR-A MLX-only module: mlx_loader, mlx_trainer,
mlx_compile, mlx_utils, mlx_cce, gated_delta_vjp. These all do
`import mlx.core as mx` at module level; this is the test that
catches a future change to those modules that would only surface
on a real Mac.
- Re-runs the same three dispatch test files the Linux job runs.
The monkeypatch spoofs still apply on real hardware, so this is
also the canary that the spoofs do not collide with the real
environment.
The Linux job is unchanged. Both jobs trigger on the same path
filter; mlx-real-apple-silicon caps at 15 minutes since the mlx
install is heavier than the Linux dep set.
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