Compiling for Apple Silicon

[moyd]

Hi,

I understand there is no official support for Apple Silicon universal binary that would allow OpenCPN to run natively on the M1 and M2 equipped macs at this date, but at the same time the developer manual hints of such ("The bellow instructions concentrate on the official x86 build, but should be mostly valid on ARM based systems as well.")

I did an naive attempt to build on my Macbook Air equipped with an M1 processor, but it ultimately failed compiling with error message: CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:2617 (find_library):
Could not find MPG123 using the following names: mpg123

Just wondering if anyone else has attempted to compile OpenCPN as a universal binary for mac before and if so - did you take notes of the necessary steps? Would be very interesting to see the performance boost gained by not running through the Rosetta emulation layer

[nohal]

The issue you see is caused by Homebrew on ARM using /opt/homebrew/ instead of /usr/local and should be pretty straight forward to address.
The performance gain will be pretty much unnoticeable I'm afraid.

[moyd]

Thanks.. I was able to get around this and a couple other quirks and it compiled successfully for arm64.

I feel its faster/smoother while zooming/panning (CM93) But it could be some kind of confirmation bias setting in

It was a fun exercise anyways

[bdbcat]

moyd...
Would interested in details of how you built for Apple M2 silicon, for reference.


Thanks
Dave

[bdgWesternMass]

Originally Posted by nohal

The issue you see is caused by Homebrew on ARM using /opt/homebrew/ instead of /usr/local and should be pretty straight forward to address.
The performance gain will be pretty much unnoticeable I'm afraid.

Does symlinking /opt/homebrew/ to /usr/local/ work?

Is anyone interested in a macports port file?

[nohal]

Originally Posted by bdgWesternMass

Does symlinking /opt/homebrew/ to /usr/local/ work?

Not really, there is reason why they use /opt/homebrew on ARM. The proper solution we need to implement is to adjust the cmake hints for ARM arch when building for macOS. Not too much work, but has to be done.

[bdgWesternMass]

Originally Posted by nohal

Not really, there is reason why they use /opt/homebrew on ARM. The proper solution we need to implement is to adjust the cmake hints for ARM arch when building for macOS. Not too much work, but has to be done.

I don't understand that answer. There is always reason that path is used and a symlink is always the workaround?


I don't actually need an explanation. I just thought it was strange response.

[nohal]

If you are interested why Homebrew works the way it does, read for example https://apple.stackexchange.com/ques...e-silicon-macs

[moyd]

Originally Posted by bdbcat

moyd...
Would interested in details of how you built for Apple M2 silicon, for reference.


Thanks
Dave

Well I did not document much, but in general follow the developer manual here: https://opencpn-manuals.github.io/ma...v/mac-osx.html

Install homebrew if you have not already
Install dependencies (I also installed wxwidgets via homebrew)
Clone git repository

I had to change line 2619 in CMakeList.txt to:

if (APPLE)
find_library(
MPG123 NAMES mpg123
PATHS /opt/homebrew/lib/mpg123 #NO_DEFAULT_PATH
REQUIRED
)

from there its back to the docs again so mkdir bulld && cd build && configure .. && make -j4


Please note that I only made it compile, launched it once and played around with it (on land) for a total of 10 minutes or so

[wernertoonk]

Interesting conversation. Just tried to setup a development environment on Silicon M3 Sonoma 14.5. Currently the build script generates (too many) errors like:

In file included from /Users/wernertoonk/sources/OpenCPN/model/src/peer_client.cpp:44:
/Users/wernertoonk/sources/OpenCPN/model/include/model/rest_server.h:225:38: error: 'path' is unavailable: introduced in macOS 10.15
virtual bool StartServer(const fs:ath& certificate_location) = 0;

Online I found some (very) recent marks about similar errors, though no solution yet. Perhaps anyone here ran into this before?

[nohal]

This thread is outdated, OpenCPN builds just fine on Apple Silicon nowadays, I do it all the time. Just follow the build instructions from https://opencpn-manuals.github.io/ma...v/mac-osx.html

[wernertoonk]

Thx Nohal.

I allready found the instructions and followed them quite precisely.
Then while running ci/generic-build-macos.sh I do get the errors as indicated.

Must be some setting ... though I can't figure out which one yet. Will give it another try tomorrow. Bedtime in this timezone.

[nohal]

What you see is related to std::filesystem which was missing from macOS standard C++ library before 10.15. That of course makes no sense on Apple Silicon as these ancient versions of macOS existed only for Intel.
The only way I can imagine you could get there is having your environment set to try to build for a very old deployment target. This is usually done using the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET environment variable.
Also, in case you did not start with a clean table, make sure to completely wipe your build directory, which might contain some cached stuff cmake is reusing in case you had it around for some time.

[nohal]

You can compare the output you get locally to the log of the ARM macOS 14 CI build we are running - https://github.com/OpenCPN/OpenCPN/a...ob/25584430625

[wernertoonk]

Well ... obviously didn't go to sleep and tried it all again. Removed homebrew (it's a new machine) and started all over. Still the same errors: : 'path' is unavailable: introduced in macOS 10.15 ...

I might be misreading / misinterpreting some of the instructions here. If anyone has a clue ... please.