RFR: 8341097: GHA: Demote Mac x86 jobs to build only

[Aleksey Shipilev]

On Mon, 30 Sep 2024 10:39:33 GMT, Kim Barrett <kbarrett at openjdk.org> wrote:

> This change seems premature. Various companies (Oracle, SAP, others?) are still supporting macos-x64 on mainline.

Maybe premature, maybe not. We always run against the runner availability in GHA. AFAIU, MacOS 13 will EOL 3 years after release, so around Oct 2025. I don't mind waiting until next year, but want to point out that the clock is ticking on GHA support for Mac x86, and runner availability will likely get gradually worse. Given that GHA runs for every PR, I prefer to fix GHA relabililty/turnaround issues before they become pain points.

> Removing this seems to be just asking for more frequent backouts due to x64-specific changes that aren't compatible with clang.

I would assume that clang incompatibilities would be caught as build error/warnings during the build. This PR suggests to only disable the test jobs. Build jobs are still on, and at least some parts of runtime are verified when building the full JDK, e.g. when building jmods/jimages.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/21257#issuecomment-2382888957