Make ASP work on the Mac on their new Arm architecture

[oleg-alexandrov]

A user reported that the ASP build for the Mac does not work on the Apple M1 Arm architecture. I don't know when we'll have time to port ASP to it and if ISIS and other software we depend on is ready for it.

[rbeyer]

I'm not 100% sure about that. It was not clear from the error report that this was an architecture problem. The dialog window is because we're not an Apple-licensed developer, but that's nothing new. The shared terminal session is more confusing, it almost looks like a path problem.

There's supposed to be an emulation layer to allow x86 executables to run, but I suppose we'll need to get our hands on an M1 machine at some point to work problems like these and others.

[rbeyer]

Ah, its called Rosetta 2, and it is a "translation environment" not an emulator, in the strict sense.

[oleg-alexandrov]

We'll have to wait till ISIS gets there first, as a lot of our dependencies come from them. I opened an issue about that here: DOI-USGS/ISIS3#4753

Maybe in a year or two we can stop supporting the Intel Mac and shift support to the Arm Mac.

Or just let everybody use Linux. :)

[ldx119]

So what will happen now when using Apple's latest computer 2021 macbookpro, equipped with the M1 pro chip to carry out ASP+ ISIS related work?

[oleg-alexandrov]

Likely ASP won't work with your Apple computer with the M1 chip, unless their emulator program can handle it.

[dshean]

I had issues with this a few months ago, and tried several workarounds.

With latest ASP build and latest OS X update, I am able to run ASP command line utilities on ARM Mac (M1 Max). The first call for a given tool takes longer, but subsequent calls are fast.

I have not tested for full workflow, just isolated calls to dem_mosaic and point2dem.

[cneish]

Hi all, I just tried to install ASP on my Apple computer with an M1 chip, and ran into the same problems described above. I did, however, successfully install ISIS 6 about a month ago. @dshean can you advise on what workarounds you used to install ASP on your Mac?