Apple Silicon plan

[mcollina]

I'm opening a tracking issue for our plan regarding apple silicon, including our dependencies.

It might be possible to source some development kits via the Foundation if we need them, as this was done in the past for our CI. Should we work in that direction?

We have a few high meta questions to answer: should we look to backport the support to 14.x or 12.x? Or are we targeting 15.x only?

I don't think there is a lot of time.

(If any person of Apple wants to join the discussion as you said you would this is a good spot :)).

[devsnek]

I wouldn't imagine we need to make too many changes, they're just arm right?

[jasnell]

This definitely should be connected to the Windows ARM64 support as well. We have support in for that, so I wouldn't expect there to be much left to do to support Apple Silicon but it's definitely something we need to audit and make sure we're fully supporting.

[ChALkeR]

I'm not sure what is the problem we are trying to solve here.

For example, what are the potential problems and what might be needed to be done, except for extending the CI matrix?

Upd: ah, @jasnell comment from seconds ago explains it.

[jasnell]

Specifically, among other things we need to verify...

• Do all of our native dependencies support ARM64
  • brotli
  • cares
  • histogram
  • icu-small
  • llhttp
  • nghttp2
  • nghttp3
  • ngtcp2
  • openssl
  • uv
  • uvwasi
  • v8
  • zlib
• Do all of our build tools support ARM64
  • python
  • gyp
  • c/c++ linter
  • cctest
  • icu
  • code-cache
  • snapshot
• Do we have CI coverage
  • Apple Silicon
  • Windows ARM64

The answer is likely yes to all most of these and we can likely check everything off but we should make sure.

[mcollina]

I'm not sure what is the problem we are trying to solve here.

Logistics.

My current issue as the CPC representative is to check if we need to try to buy a few dev kits and give them to collaborators and/or add them to our CI. Without the devices, we can't do much.

[targos]

There's probably some non-trivial work to do to teach GYP to generate ARM projects for XCode

[richardlau]

Without test machines for the CI any support would be experimental at best.

@jasnell We'd also need to verify python and gyp in terms of build tools.

We have a few high meta questions to answer: should we look to backport the support to 14.x or 12.x? Or are we targeting 15.x only?

For backporting I think that really depends on what (if any) changes are required. I'm particularly concerned if we'll need to introduce branches in the gyp files to support ARM on macOS.

[jasnell]

@jasnell We'd also need to verify python and gyp in terms of build tools.

Added to the checklist

[jasnell]

My current issue as the CPC representative is to check if we need to try to buy a few dev kits and give them to collaborators and/or add them to our CI. Without the devices, we can't do much.

As part of this, let's explore also adding Windows ARM64 to the CI test matrix.

[mhdawson]

@AshCripps can you check with our OSX infra donator to see if they have any plans to include ARM64 support.

[sxa]

(If any person of Apple wants to join the discussion as you said you would this is a good spot :)).

If this tweet I RT'd is legit (possibly from WWDC - I wasn't watching!) then they may already be looking at it: https://twitter.com/MarkVillacampa/status/1275200446764912643

[richardlau]

My current issue as the CPC representative is to check if we need to try to buy a few dev kits and give them to collaborators and/or add them to our CI. Without the devices, we can't do much.

As part of this, let's explore also adding Windows ARM64 to the CI test matrix.

https://ci.nodejs.org/job/node-test-commit-windows-arm64/

History:

• Windows unofficial builds unofficial-builds#2
• Add Windows ARM64 temporary test machines build#1780

[jasnell]

@richardlau ... yeah, I know that job has existed but as far as I know and I could be mistaken) it is not run as part of regular CI runs, correct?

[richardlau]

@richardlau ... yeah, I know that job has existed but as far as I know and I could be mistaken) it is not run as part of regular CI runs, correct?

Correct. I think we even stopped producing unofficial builds for Windows ARM (AFAIK).

[jasnell]

...if we need to try to buy a few dev kits and give them to collaborators and/or add them to our CI. Without the devices, we can't do much.

@mcollina ... likely a good idea, with priority going to members of the @nodejs/build team so that they can work out any possible issues getting things to compile and run.