Apple Announce macOS for Apple Silicone and macOS 11 at WWDC 2020

[Geir Nøklebye]

In their WWDC keynote address today Apple announced the next generation of macOS – macOS Big Sur (or macOS 11) in tandem with the announcement of Apple Silicon based hardware that was demoed on the A12Z processor currently at the heart of the iPad PRO.

They keynote announced a transition period of 2 years from Intel processors to Apple Silicone based on the ARM instruction set for their entire product line, with first products in consumer hands later this year.

With the announcement a 15 year era for macOS on Intel is over, and the same is the case for OpenGL that has been on the platform even longer.

What this exactly means for development of the macOS version of the Dayturn viewer – or any viewer for SecondLife and Opensim running on macOS is still unclear as Linden Lab who writes the rendering code every viewer depends on has yet to announce support for and a rewrite of the renderer for Metal; the (only) graphics framework that runs on Apple Silicone.

Ebbe Linden has scheduled a live video for later today, so we might get some more insight on their plans there.

For Apple's announcement on the new Apple Silicone hardware, check out the WWDC keynote presentation at the 1:26.00 mark.

Follow this space for updates as more details become available

 

[Geir Nøklebye]

Ebbe Linden's video did not give any answers for how LL will handle the transition to Apple Silicon, and OZ Linden's video yesterday only casually touched onto the issue based on the general fact known before Apple's announcement that Apple have deprecated OpenGL support in 2018.
He said they have a team of experts looking into how to handle that, and Vulkan was mentioned as a possible solution.

It is, however, already established that Apple will not allow Vulkan to run on the system as it will compete with Metal, and the Vulkan driver would require Apple to sign it for it to run on even Mojave (macOS 10.14). So that option is simply not available.

I tried to compile llrender (the portion of the viewer code that actually renders the 3D world to the screen) on the new Xcode 12 beta, which can both produce Intel and ARM binaries. It choked immediately on not finding OpenGL in the SDK, so that was that. – But that was as expected.

I have asked a question to Apple through an official channel for the status for OpenGL on existing Intel based Macs for the upcoming macOS 10.16, but also for the status on OpenGL for new Intel based Macs Apple surprisingly have said are in the pipeline for release later this year.

 

[Geir Nøklebye]

All right, got an answer on the OpenGL question and they pointed to the Porting Your macOS Apps to Apple Silicon document they published yesterday where it says:

• OpenGL is deprecated, but is available on Apple silicon.

Migrate Away from Specific Technologies
macOS includes a few technologies that are currently deprecated or discouraged for active development. If your app uses one of the following technologies, migrate to an appropriate replacement as soon as possible:

• OpenGL—Use Metal instead.
• OpenCL—Use Metal instead.
• AddressBook—Use the Contacts framework instead.
• Carbon APIs—Migrate to AppKit, Foundation, and other modern APIs.
• IOKit kernel extensions—Migrate to DriverKit where appropriate; see DriverKit framework.

Apple silicon still provides support for the preceding technologies, and you may continue to use them in macOS 11. However, this support may be removed in a future version of macOS, so migration to newer technologies is recommended.

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So that buys us some time. They have also released a version of Xcode 12 beta that cannot produce ARM binaries, and this version could compile the renderer, although there were other issues that prevented the viewer from building, but that can be sorted.

What it looks like right now is that the viewer can be built for macOS 10.16 for Intel based Macs without too much effort, while an ARM version may be possible to build, but we shall see.

In any case a new renderer based on Metal is needed.

 

[Geir Nøklebye]

I tested Dayturn on the macOS 11 beta on an Intel based Mac, and the viewer seemed to run without issues except not being able to connect to the microphone for voice.

As they have kept OpenGL around also for this version of the system, there are not that many dramatic changes to the Intel based side of the equation except more strict handling of kernel extensions, which might explain why the microphone was not detected on the system.

For a beta running on spinning rust of a USB 3 port, the system was surprisingly snappy. This version of the system is completely void of 32-bit code, so that should make the system both leaner and run better on a 64-bit processor (other reviewers have had the same comment).




The story on an ARM (or more correct Apple Silicon) system might be completely different. The Intel viewer could in theory run on the system, but as the viewer is virtually void of any Apple frameworks, there is not much to translate for Rosetta2, so that leaves it for emulating x86_64 instructions on the ARM processor most likely with a major performance hit.

LL commented in their TPV developer meeting Friday that probably the biggest hurdle to get a viewer (still with OpenGL) to run ARM is all the libraries needed for the viewer, in addition to Intel specific portions of the viewer code.

Swapping OpenGL for Metal is a major rewrite, however, but for now it buys everyone some more time to act.