Can this be built on an Intel or M1 Mac?

[rwhitby]

Using this issue to determine if there is a viable build process for macOS.

Anyone tried this already?

[hansfbaier]

I'll try it gladly for a hardware donation 🙂

[jrrk2]

Last time I tried openFPGAloader build in home brew (M1 iMac), but it didn’t find any devices.

[kdunn926]

@rwhitby - I built this on mac OS 10.13. I cobbled it together with some dependencies from Anaconda and brew - not the best approach. One specific worth noting was making sure to use clang for prjxray and nextpnr-xilinx... I did it roughly like this:

$ env BOOST_ROOT=/opt/anaconda3 CC=/usr/local/Cellar/llvm/10.0.1_1/bin/clang CXX=/usr/local/Cellar/llvm/10.0.1_1/bin/clang++ cmake -DARCH=xilinx -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/nextpnr ..
$ make install
$ install_name_tool -add_rpath /opt/anaconda3/lib /opt/nextpnr/bin/nextpnr-xilinx

If I recall, one thing I needed to get openFPGAloader working correctly was this:
https://koblents.com/Ches/Original-Work/171-Unloading-FTDI-drivers-on-a-Mac-for-libftdi/

[rwhitby]

This command line seems to work for me on macOS Intel Montery 12.1:

env CC=/usr/local/opt/llvm/bin/clang CXX=/usr/local/opt/llvm/bin/clang++ LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/llvm/lib -Wl,-rpath,/usr/local/opt/llvm/lib" cmake -DARCH=xilinx -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/opt/nextpnr -DBUILD_GUI=0 ..

Will update this comment with the homebrew packages required later ...

[rwhitby]

rwhitby#1 now supports building on Intel macOS.

[jrrk2]

brew install boost-python is disabled on apple silicon, this could be the main issue stopping it from working on M1 Mac. Not sure why but rebuilding boost from source might reveal a more detailed reason. Python is wonderful except when it goes wrong, and I have a hard time debugging anything Python related.

[jrrk2]

Duh, boost-python is obsolete and replaced by boost-python3

[jrrk2]

It builds on AppleSilicon.

time make BOARD=genesys2 clean blinky.bit takes 12.4s on Intel Frost Canyon and 6.68s on AppleSilicon M1 iMac.

This is the first time I have seen Xilinx programming working on ARM, and leads to the interesting possibility of an FPGA modifying itself (using hard ARM or RISCV processor)

(the .fasm files are different between the two versions, but both seem to work)

openFPGAloader works on Apple as well, but Python3 and libusb had to be installed from source for unknown reasons, possibly cmake is treating python@3.9 as python2 (?)

[rwhitby]

Please comment on #28 with the macOS packages required.