• Machine types available for Linux - x86-64
• Machine types available for Linux - Arm64
• Container images
• Docker-in-Docker support
• Example .gitlab-ci.yml file

Hosted runners on Linux

Hosted runners on Linux for GitLab.com run on Google Cloud Compute Engine. Each job gets a fully isolated, ephemeral virtual machine (VM). The default region is us-east1.

Each VM uses the Google Container-Optimized OS (COS) and the latest version of Docker Engine running the docker+machine executor. The machine type and underlying processor type might change. Jobs optimized for a specific processor design might behave inconsistently.

Untagged jobs will run on the small Linux x86-64 runner.

Machine types available for Linux - x86-64

GitLab offers the following machine types for hosted runners on Linux x86-64.

Machine types available for Linux - Arm64

GitLab offers the following machine type for hosted runners on Linux Arm64.

Container images

As runners on Linux are using the docker+machine executor, you can choose any container image by defining the image in your .gitlab-ci.yml file. Please be mindful that the selected Docker image is compatible with the underlying processor architecture.

If no image is set, the default is ruby:3.1.

Docker-in-Docker support

Runners with any of the saas-linux-<size>-<architecture> tags are configured to run in privileged mode to support Docker-in-Docker. With these runners, you can build Docker images natively or run multiple containers in your isolated job.

Runners with the gitlab-org tag do not run in privileged mode and cannot be used for Docker-in-Docker builds.

Example .gitlab-ci.yml file

To use a machine type other than small, add a tags: keyword to your job. For example:

job_small:
  script:
    - echo "This job is untagged and runs on the default small Linux x86-64 instance"

job_medium:
  tags:
    - saas-linux-medium-amd64
  script:
    - echo "This job runs on the medium Linux x86-64 instance"

job_large:
  tags:
    - saas-linux-large-arm64
  script:
    - echo "This job runs on the large Linux Arm64 instance"