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Running Drake on macOS ARM hardware via Rosetta 2

Instructions

**The advice on this page is no longer necessary as of current Drake.**

For older versions of Drake, users running on Apple's newer arm64 hardware were required to run Drake's x86_64 binaries using Apple's Rosetta 2 emulation. That is no longer the case as of v1.9.0. The page serves as a historical record for how to run Drake x86_64 under Rosetta 2 emulation. Most users should ignore it and follow one of the typical installation instructions instead.

To run macOS x86_64 pre-compiled Drake binaries on Apple's newer arm64 hardware, you must do all of your work in an x86_64 shell:

  1. Use arch -x86_64 /bin/bash to obtain a shell.
  2. In that shell, run arch (with no arguments).
    • Expect to see i386 as the output, which confirms that the shell is running as x86_64.
  3. Make sure there is not an ARM version of brew (i.e., /opt/homebrew/bin/brew) in your $PATH.
    • You can use echo $PATH to see what's there.
    • You can use which -a brew to check which brew will be run.
  4. Install Homebrew as usual from the x86_64 shell.
  5. Install Drake as usual from the x86_64 shell.

Additional information

The arch command serves two purposes; to report the "active" architecture (when given no arguments), or to run a selected architecture of a universal binary (e.g., /bin/bash, /usr/bin/python).

While the "active" architecture defaults to ARM, having any x86_64 process as an ancestor appears sufficient to change the "active" architecture, so long as arch -arm64 is not used. Many programs will respect the reported architecture, but brew is an exception, and will always attempt to install software for the architecture of the brew executable that is executed; this is why it is important to ensure that /opt/homebrew/bin is not in your $PATH when attempting to install or run Drake using x86_64 emulation on ARM. Otherwise, once in x86_64 mode, things will tend to stay that way, such that accidentally switching back to ARM mode should be rare.