Simsopt fails to run on mac M3 with hardware error - illegal instruction: 4

[salomon73]

Hi,

I managed to install simsopt on my laptop, a macbook with apple silicon M3 processor.
I am using conda, installed from brew, and updated to the latest version. I followed M1/M2 installation, and in particular the conda toolchain only installation process.

I bypassed the difficulty to install f90wrap with --no-build-isolation by using the conda-forge channel. The code builds after installing a few additional packages.

However, when trying to any simsopt example script, every single step involving
from simsopt import <module_name> fails with the following hardware error: illegal instruction: 4.

Here is what I tried to solve the issue:

• Created a conda virtual env with osx-64 architecture. The default setting on silicon mac is set on osx-arm, although apple provides us with an emulator called Rosetta to run osx-64 packages or apps on arm64 architecture. I installed all packages from conda-forge with this architecture, and built simsopt this way as well. Building works but execution fails. In this configuration:
  arch -> arm64 uname -m -> arm64
• Tried the same without the osx-64 conda env, running everything from terminal opened with Rosetta. In this configuration:
  arch -> i386 uname -m -> x86_64
  Simsopt builds the same way but I get the same error when executing scripts, when trying to import scripts. From what I have understood, this same kind of issue has been encountered with packages like tensorflow, for many people.
  I don't know how to solve that bug.

Some additional informations:

• I created a specific simsopt environment using conda env, not virtualenv. All packages installed in the environment have been installed using conda install through the conda-forge channel, except a few ones installed via pip install --no-build isolation.

• Building simsopt initially failed as pybind11 was missing. Installing pybind11 with conda-forge gave this error:
  `Could not find a package configuration file provided by pybind11 with any
  of the following names:

  pybind11Config.cmake
  pybind11-config.cmake
  `

I solved is using pip install --no-build-isolation pybind11[global].

• The MacOS software version is 14.1.
• Rosetta fails to bridge for certain packages

Let me know if any additional information is requested.

Thank you.

[salomon73]

To use some packages I installed that are native for Intel and haven't been bridged to Apple silicon, I used my terminal with the Rosetta II emulator when I installed simsopt. The code as then built for arch x86_64, and failed to run on arm64.
This might be helpful if people encounter the same issue: when building the code, make sure that Rosetta is disabled. A quick verification:

uname -m 
arm64

Regards.