Support Apple M1 ARM by releasing Universal Binaries

[robd003]

Could you please release universal binaries for macOS so that it's optimized for M1 users? Apple is transitioning to ARM-only over the next year and there will only be legacy devices running on x86_64.

It looks like doing this should be pretty simple with this: https://github.com/electron/universal

Another idea would be to build a darwin-x64 release and a darwin-arm64 release and let the user choose which might help save on disk space.

[robd003]

Here's a quick fix to get lbrynet working as a universal binary: lbryio/lbry-sdk#3515

[robd003]

@jessopb I'd be happy to help debug on M1 & x64 macOS systems if you need anyone to test.

[jessopb]

It seems like electron-builder docs don't reference this yet?
electron-userland/electron-builder#5392
electron-userland/electron-builder#5392 (comment) process seems to be here.
Will look into it more. May have to move some build scripts around.

[robd003]

Looks like it's working using electron-builder >= 22.14.2

Check out this ticket: electron-userland/electron-builder#5689 (comment)

[darrenmhill]

Any updates on this please? M1 Macs have been out for a long time now.

[robd003]

It's stalled because lbry-sdk needs to upgrade to atleast Python 3.9.1 before M1 support is available

Here's a pull request to look at: lbryio/lbry-sdk#3623

I'd love it if we could go straight to Python 3.10 since it'll still be getting bugfixes whereas I think 3.9 is only getting security fixes now

[darrenmhill]

It's stalled because lbry-sdk needs to upgrade to atleast Python 3.9.1 before M1 support is available

Ah ok, given that's the dependency, it makes sense. Thanks for the update.

[darrenmhill]

Any updates on this? I don't see any recent activity on the thread above.

[robd003]

@darrenmhill I'd ask @moodyjon how it's going

If you have any idea how to fix these issues that'd be a huge help: https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-sdk/files/9315430/py39_2.ci.failures.txt

[moodyjon]

The original Python 3.9 effort was pretty close to completion. Just waiting on one more lbryio/hub fix and I can submit a third batch of test fixes to lbry-sdk. I fixed a lot of intermittent test failures which were happening even with Python 3.7, including the ones in the py39_2.ci.failures.txt file.

Unfortunately, a new thing popped up with our libtorrent dependency. Now that module is required not optional. And I can't get it on MacOS aarch64.
lbryio/lbry-sdk#3669
arvidn/libtorrent#7131

[darrenmhill]

Good to hear progress is being made on this! I can't wait for the day my Mac is running only native apps. LBRY is quite sluggish under Rosetta 2, so really looking forward to this.

[robd003]

@darrenmhill I'm working on fixing arvidn/libtorrent#7131 so hopefully we can move ahead soon!

[darrenmhill]

Any more updates on an M1/M2 release please? It would be great to get an optimised version of LBRY up and running soon! What are the current roadblocks/dependencies?

[darrenmhill]

Bouncing following the latest release.

[moodyjon]

There is now a build of "wheels" for libtorrent. I was only able to get the libtorrent build to work for python 3.9 and 3.10:
arvidn/libtorrent#7292

but it doesn't get uploaded automatically to pypi

Next steps would be:

1. Bump to Python 3.9 attempt 3. lbry-sdk#3711 bump lbry-sdk to python 3.9
2. Convince libtorrent project to a) make a new release and b) upload macOS ARM64 wheels to pypi manually?
3. bump lbry-sdk to use latest libtorrent
4. Work out how to change the lbry-sdk workflows (.github/worflows/main.yml) to produce a macOS ARM64 build.

Note that for libtorrent build on MacOS ARM64, I had to use an alternate build/test mechanism called "Cirrus CI" which is quite different than ordinary GitHub actions, but offers MacOS M1 runners. GitHub has been slow in providing public M1 runners (actions/runner-images#2187). So number (4) requires either using Cirrus CI or waiting for GitHub to provide M1 runners.

[robd003]

Upvoting this ticket arvidn/libtorrent#7308 might help expedite uploading the wheels to pypi

[darrenmhill]

Really looking forward to an M1 build release. It's been a few years now since the M1 Mac was released, so a LBRY build is very much welcome!

[darrenmhill]

Bumping this. Is this project still progressing, since I notice there have been no new releases in ~4 months.