Add a pre-built binary for Mac M1.

[brugger1]

I got a request for a pre-built version of VisIt for the Mac M1. Here is the e-mail.

Hi Eric,

Hope you are doing well. I am doing yet another tutorial on VisIt this Friday for my master’s course on Data Visualization at UCSD. Some students are using the new M1 mac’s and there are currently no VisIt builds available for it. I do understand that the mac builds are annoying but just wanted to queue in a request if it helps make a case to consider them in future. Meanwhile I have advised students to arrange another computer with a support OS.

Best Regards -Amit

[smao-astro]

Hi,

I am an M1 Mac user, and I am looking forward to having a pre-built package. Any updates?

[markcmiller86]

Well, I just fired off a generic build_visit on my wife's M1 system. Lets see what happens 😉 and I'll report back.

[markcmiller86]

Ok, we're failing pretty quickly in the build of numpy...

  inflating: numpy-1.16.6/numpy/matrixlib/tests/test_multiarray.py
  inflating: numpy-1.16.6/numpy/matrixlib/tests/test_matrix_linalg.py
  inflating: numpy-1.16.6/numpy/matrixlib/tests/test_regression.py
  inflating: numpy-1.16.6/numpy/matrixlib/tests/test_interaction.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./setup.py", line 9, in <module>
    import setuptools
  File "/Users/mark_1/Downloads/visit/setuptools-44.0.0/setuptools/__init__.py", line 20, in <module>
    from setuptools.dist import Distribution, Feature
  File "/Users/mark_1/Downloads/visit/setuptools-44.0.0/setuptools/dist.py", line 36, in <module>
    from setuptools import windows_support
  File "/Users/mark_1/Downloads/visit/setuptools-44.0.0/setuptools/windows_support.py", line 2, in <module>
    import ctypes
  File "/Users/mark_1/Downloads/visit/third_party/python/3.7.7/arm-apple-darwin20_clang/lib/python3.7/ctypes/__init__.py", line 7, in <module>
    from _ctypes import Union, Structure, Array
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named '_ctypes'
Could not install setuptools
numpy build failed. Bailing out.

Its probably something small but I don't have time to investigate.

We'll consider uping the priority of M1 builds at our next project meeting.

Stay tuned.

[markcmiller86]

It looks like this might be related to whether the installed python can find libffi-dev or not. I have found and installed libffi-dev from sources but I don't yet know how to tell python where to find it.

[smao-astro]

Hi @markcmiller86,

This sounds really promising! Seems that you are pretty close (or succeed) to install visit from build_visit.

If the official pre-build package won't be available in days, I would like to try to install visit following your path. I will spend some time today looking around the doc. Would you like to share with me what modification/configuration do I need? Thanks!

[markcmiller86]

@smao-astro the libffi-dev issue is likely only the first problem that halted forward progress. I suspect there will be more before we can get a complete build. I think I am presently the only developer with access to an M1 mac and I have a number of other priorities as well. So, we can exchange thoughts here on progress but I think it will still be a while (likely several weeks), before I've been able to put in any time on this to complete it.

[smao-astro]

@markcmiller86 I see, thank you! I will post here if I get something looks interesting.

[BradWhitlock]

You're going to need to use VTK 9 and Qt 6 to get an M1 build. I started a bit on M1 (see visitusers.org Apple Silicon) 1.5 years ago. VisIt's VTK support was not there at the time and it maybe still is not at VTK 9.

I run prebuilt Intel binaries through Rosetta2 and that works.

Brad

On Sat, Jul 9, 2022 at 6:19 PM smao-astro @.***> wrote:

@markcmiller86 https://github.com/markcmiller86 I see, thank you! I will post here if I get something looks interesting.

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