The ports-11_arm64-builder is offline since 3 months

[tuffnatty (Phil Krylov)]

The ports-11_arm64-builder is offline since January, with quite a big queue. I have not found any information on the outage. Should I hope the builder will get well eventually?

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

This was the resolution to #69048, since there is only enough room on the existing hardware for 3 installations.

[tuffnatty (Phil Krylov)]

Thanks! An older @ryandesign's post quoted there mentions a few more possibilities:

Or I could ask Mac Stadium if there is a way to swap our machine for one with a bigger disk. Or I could follow up with another party who has offered MacPorts the use of another Apple Silicon Mac mini.

To me, omitting the darwin_20.arm64 builds among all the others (10.5+) is strange. Let's hope the project gets more hardware.

I have acknowledged myself with the related discussion on outdated OS/arch support. IMHO keeping old OS versions working is an invaluable competitive advantage for MacPorts, as building software releases on older OS/SDK versions is required for wider compatibility, and not having to recompile a half of the system there is a huge help.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to tuffnatty:

To me, omitting the darwin_20.arm64 builds among all the others (10.5+) is strange. Let's hope the project gets more hardware.

Omitting Darwin 20 arm64 builds is not strange. It's easily explained by the fact that we have one Apple Silicon build machine and its disk is big enough for only three environments. Right now, that's macOS 12, 13, and 14. If we get a bigger disk or a second machine we can re-add macOS 11 builds.

We never built binaries for 10.5 Intel. We briefly built binaries for 10.5 PowerPC years ago but the hardware failed.

IMHO keeping old OS versions working is an invaluable competitive advantage for MacPorts, as building software releases on older OS/SDK versions is required for wider compatibility, and not having to recompile a half of the system there is a huge help.

MacPorts still works fine on macOS 11 arm64 and you can install any ports you want, they'll just have to compile from source instead of getting a binary. Thankfully, Apple Silicon processors are fast so this doesn't take very long for most ports.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Thanks to MacStadium we have a larger disk now and can recreate the arm64 build setups for macOS 11 and 12 and soon add one for macOS 26.

However, the builds happening today are just a test that I've set it up correctly. Continue to expect the macOS 11 arm64 builder to be offline for long periods while builds for newer macOS versions are prioritized.

This is because arm64 macOS 11 cannot virtualize macOS and because arm64 macOS 11 cannot be virtualized.

At some point we cleared buildbot's backlog of builds for arm64 macOS 11, therefore once the current backlog of 3900 units of work is complete, my automated script will schedule all remaining ports to be built in small batches.