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Apple ARM M1 OSX

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Timo Heister edited this page Feb 5, 2023 · 5 revisions

This document describes installation instructions for deal.II for Apple ARM devices (M1 and similar, including the mac mini and macbook pro).

Please note: While deal.II was found to be working using the instructions below, please keep in mind that it is not a commonly used platform by the core deal.II team and not everything is guaranteed to work. Future updates to macOS might also break what was once working. Additionally, some parts of deal.II are not optimized on ARM and are likely more performant on x64 machines.

1. Set up system

Open a native terminal and check that typing machine returns arm64e, if not, you are running under Rosetta emulation.

Now type clang to trigger the installation of the command line tools.

Then install homebrew as detailed on https://brew.sh/

2. Install compiler and MPI

brew install --cc=clang cmake open-mpi gcc@11

A Note about compilers choice

You now have the following compilers:

  1. clang / clang++ (in /usr/bin): this is the system Apple clang compiler
  2. gcc / g++ (in /usr/bin): these are symlinks to clang
  3. gcc-11 / g++-11 (/opt/homebrew/bin): GCC installed by homebrew (version 11 when I wrote this)

You can compile with gcc 11 but this is not recommended (see the bottom of this document for more information). By default, mpicxx will use gcc, which is actually clang. You can check that this is the case on your machine by checking the last line printed by mpicxx -v.

3. Install deal.II and dependencies

git clone https://github.com/dealii/candi
cd candi
./candi.sh -j 8 --packages="hdf5 p4est trilinos dealii"

Note: If you need additional dependencies, try them at your own risk. You might need to switch to the master candi branch (at least at the time this guide was written).

Why not gcc?

We strongly recommend using clang as gcc is building generic ARM executables that are not optimized for the M1 and you might run into linker errors depending on how many dependencies you have enabled. The errors look similar to

ld: b(l) ARM64 branch out of range (135252872 max is +/-128MB): from __ZN5boost7archive17archive_exceptionC2ENS1_14exception_codeEPKcS4_ (0x00019B08) to ___assert_rtn@0x00000000 (0x08116BA4) in '__ZN5boost7archive17archive_exceptionC2ENS1_14exception_codeEPKcS4_' from ../bundled/boost-1.70.0/libs/serialization/src/CMakeFiles/obj_boost_serialization_debug.dir/archive_exception.cpp.o for architecture arm64

If you want to try, enable gcc like this before setting up your system with candi:

export OMPI_FC=gfortran-11;export OMPI_CC=gcc-11;export OMPI_CXX=g++-11
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