Timeline for Homebrew on ARM Macs?

I am not sure whether this is the right place to ask this: Many open source tools depend on Homebrew for their building process; for example Neovim. Is there a rough plan when there will be a preliminary support for ARM Macs such that these tools can prepare the migration?

2 Likes

As soon as people get it working they’ll hopefully make pull requests to fix bugs.

1 Like

I’ll be saying goodbye to macOS. I’m a server dev in Machine Learning. Mac moving to ARM is a non-starter until Apple ARM is pervasive and it will never be. They just cut off a lot of us maybe forever.

I don’t see how we can do with less than `nix as an OS + AMD64 as chip architecture. This is why I can’t use Windows without a VM and why the ARM VM will not do since it is not a hypervisor VM but is really emulation. Docker needs AMD64 on macOS since it uses a hypervisor VM to make dockerr work. Again bye bye Apple.

Sad but am I wrong? I see no way forward and am double checking other projects that are broken with ARM like Brew.

I know some people already got brew working on ARM for Linux ages ago. It certainly needs patches but with Amazon providing easy ARM servers and Apple providing easy ARM hardware I don’t think development is in such a bad place as you think it will be.

2 Likes

@qvacua There’s no timeline but our macOS 11 compatibility tracking sheet may give you a rough idea.

@pferrel There are lots of good reasons to switch away from the Apple ecosystem. The unfolding hardware transition may be one of them but I feel it’s much too early to pass judgment.

Regarding Homebrew’s future: that’s the last thing I’m worried about. It’s been days since we started adding arm64 support. We’re progressing slowly but steadily.

1 Like

Sorry if this is off topic…

Agreed, but it’s only a single laptop purchase decision and for a developer there isn’t really much downside to Ubuntu on a Dell while there will be a pretty big downside to ARM. Apple is not making this move to bring ME more speed or power. They want us locked into an air-tight ecosystem. Who buys a MacBook Pro because it benchmarks better than a Dell XPS 15 (btw not sure it does)?

And when AWS ARM becomes important I will reconsider. Apple does not make this decision for me, the public clouds and demand for them makes this decision. In this case AWS is reacting to demand, Apple customers did not demand this move, they do it for their own rather obvious reasons.

It is. With respect, this forum isn’t the best place to discuss what your personal preferences will or won’t be.

2 Likes

Sorry for the necromancy… I am moving to arm now, as it has native support for Tensorflow (at least it was announced in the presentation video) and so I don’t have to carry two laptops anymore. Do we know anything more about home brew support?

1 Like

I’m moving to arm too, brew is very important to me, what is the status of brew on ARM? Will it work in emulation mode?

When running in Rosetta it should work, but I haven’t seen any pull requests by Apple to fix homebrew formulae yet so anything that works on ARM native is purely coincedental.

1 Like

I’ve installed Homebrew manually to /opt/homebrew in an ARM64 Big Sur system and received warnings which directed me to run Homebrew under Rosetta. However I couldn’t find any instruction how to do this.

Warning: You are running macOS on a arm64 CPU architecture.
We do not provide support for this (yet).
Reinstall Homebrew under Rosetta 2 until we support it.
You will encounter build failures with some formulae.
Please create pull requests instead of asking for help on Homebrew's GitHub,
Discourse, Twitter or any other official channels. You are responsible for
resolving any issues you experience while you are running this
unsupported configuration.

Warning: You are using macOS 11.0.
We do not provide support for this released but not yet supported version.
You will encounter build failures with some formulae.
Please create pull requests instead of asking for help on Homebrew's GitHub,
Discourse, Twitter or any other official channels. You are responsible for
resolving any issues you experience while you are running this
released but not yet supported version.

I presume an ARM64 Mac would need to have two Homebrew installations, one for the native ARM64 and the other is for packages that still needs to run under Rosetta?

It would be great if those warnings link to a HOW-TO instruction on how to set this up.

I recommend you install what you want in /usr/local on a Big Sur Intel machine, tar up the whole thing and move it to the ARM Mac. That is what I’ve done.

Until such time a need arises to install new packages or upgrade existing ones. This would be unsustainable at best.

This is not a permanent solution obviously, but it should get us a month or two down the road. In the case of build servers, brew upgrade isn’t a command that gets run more than once or twice a year. Even on my personal machine, I don’t regularly install new packages via brew. Once I have CMake, Go, Bash, Ninja, Git and maybe a few others on the machine, it is useful and updates aren’t critical. So it is sustainable for a few months. When the ARM builds finally arrive they will go in a completely new location, /opt

Yup.

We’re working on the documentation for this.

1 Like

More often than not they fix security issues so I’m not sure I would agree with this.

Do you know if this documentation will be available today?

It will not be available today.

That is, unless you make a pull request to add it. It’s open source after all.