Mac OS changes this year - September

[JTrowbridge319]

MacOS in September of this year is planning to drop Rosetta from all its OSs. Is BOINC ready for this change??

[AenBleidd]

Yes: we provide a FAT binaries that contain both x64 and arm64 executables. BOINC by itself doesn't rely on Rosetta. However, there might be projects' applications that still use it, but this is not something we control.

[CharlieFenton]

there might be projects' applications that still use it, but this is not something we control.

When sending work requests to projects, a BOINC client running on an Apple Silicon (arm64) computer reports that it supports both Intel (x86_64) and arm64 tasks only if Rosetta is present and enabled. Otherwise it reports support only for arm64 tasks. So if a project is properly configured, it will automatically stop sending x86_64 tasks to that computer, but will continue sending them to Intel Macs.

The one hiccup I foresee is that if a BOINC client has uncompleted Rosetta dependent tasks when the user upgrades to a version of MacOS without Rosetta, those tasks will fail with computation errors. But after that, it should not receive any more Rosetta dependent tasks.