Archive for April 30, 2021

Friday, April 30, 2021

Apple Developer Tools Memory Lane

Dave Verwer:

I lost about two hours yesterday to this tweet from Davide Di Stefano. Xcode 2 was the first version I used, but this video of Xcode 3 from Kevin Vinck took me on a delightful trip down memory lane, which ended in finding this YouTube channel and this video introducing Project Builder. Despite being such low resolution you can’t read the text, I watched more of it than I should have for a Thursday afternoon. 😬 I loved seeing features in Project Builder that are still a part of Xcode today.

Previously:

VMware Fusion on Apple Silicon Later This Year

VMware (tweet):

However, for those that need to run another operating system like Linux or Windows, Rosetta 2 doesn’t support Virtualization, and Apple silicon Macs don’t support Boot Camp. That means it’s time for us to innovate and rebuild our beloved desktop hypervisor for Macs, VMware Fusion, to support the next generation of Apple hardware.

[…]

Even with that said, and note that I’m using ‘debug’ builds which perform slower, in my 12 years at VMware I’ve never seen VMs boot and run like this.

[…]

And as far as we are aware, there is no way to buy a Windows 10 ARM license for a Mac with Apple silicon.

[…]

So, to be a bit blunt, running x86 operating systems on Apple silicon is not something we are planning to deliver with this project.

So no testing older versions of macOS, either.

That said, the team is planning to deliver a Public Tech Preview of VMware Fusion for macOS on Apple silicon before the end of this year, and we can’t wait to get it in the hands of every Apple silicon Mac owner.

Previously:

Catalina Security Update 2021-002 Breaks OpenCL

Gus Mueller (tweet):

Core Image, another framework by Apple and one that Acorn relies on heavily, uses OpenCL to process images when its renderer is set to “software” mode (the other mode is to use the GPU). Core Image tries to use OpenCL and then fails, so all images come out empty.

The quick fix is to tell Core Image not use the software renderer, and then Core Image will move everything to the GPU for processing and use Apple’s Metal framework instead of OpenCL — for most cases. I think there is still hardware out there that can’t use Metal, so it might fall back to OpenCL in that case.

[…]

Nothing in the release notes for the security update mentions OpenCL. I’m baffled and completely in the dark as to what the changes were or why they were done.

Colin Cornaby:

Also spent the morning diagnosing this. Catalina Macs suddenly stopped completely tests successfully, traced the timing back to the security update.

In our case, OpenCL breaking also breaks parts of CoreImage.

Previously:

Update (2021-05-07): Mr. Macintosh:

Catalina 2021-002 & Mojave 2021-003 Security Updates are causing boot problems on the iMac Pro.

After installing the update, some users are getting a prohibitory sign.

Update (2021-05-25): Gus Mueller:

Good news, Apple released Security Update 2021-003 Catalina yesterday for 10.15.7, and it appears to have fixed the regression which broke Acorn 6 and below.