ROS2 Jazzy Installation on Apple Silicon(M1) MacOS X(Sonoma 14.5)

[woensug-choi]

Tested and designed on macOS Sonoma 14.5 with an Apple M3 chip (36 GB), it took about 15 minutes each to install ROS2 Jazzy and Gazebo Harmonic.

Notes

• eclipse-cyclonedds is excluded from the installation process
  • It is not supported on Apple Silicon Macbooks (compile errors)
  • Ref : https://ros.org/reps/rep-2000.html

References: (None of below worked for me, so I made this script)

• https://github.com/pfavr2/install_ros2_rolling_on_mac_m1
  • Much of the code design structure is referenced from this
• https://chenbrian.ca/posts/ros2_m1/
• https://github.com/TakanoTaiga/ros2_m1_native
• https://docs.ros.org/en/jazzy/Installation/Alternatives/macOS-Development-Setup.html

For those in need, one-liner installation script

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IOES-Lab/ROS2_Jazzy_MacOS_Native_AppleSilicon/main/install.sh)"

[woensug-choi]

If we can't add anything with curl, the process to download and apply patches can't be added. Then, this PR is conceptually no go.

[rgov]

(I'm just a user, not a member of the ROS team.)

If we can't add anything with curl, the process to download and apply patches can't be added. Then, this PR is conceptually no go.

I think so. It is unusual (and unsafe) for a README to instruct you to apply a set of 3rd party patches before building. It would be a lot better to submit the patches as individual PRs to the subprojects so the development team can review them and decide how best to incorporate them into the project.

• Most of the places that you are hardcoding /opt/homebrew paths should probably instead be passing in CMake variables for find_package() to use, like -DFREETYPE_DIR=$(brew --prefix freetype2).

  • It's better to ask Homebrew where packages are installed with brew --prefix.

• It isn't advisable to patch files belonging to other packages inside the virtual environment, like easy_install. The deprecation warnings might be ugly but they're harmless.

• The patches that set include_directories(${orocos_kdl_INCLUDE_DIRS}) look reasonable. Is this useful for all platforms? If yes, why does it work as-is on Linux but not macOS?

  • The patches that hardcode the path /opt/homebrew/Cellar/orocos-kdl/1.5.1/include/ are very brittle and will break any time the orocos-kdl formula is updated to a new version. Instead, you should probably use find_package(orocos_kdl REQUIRED) and then use the ${orocos_kdl_INCLUDE_DIRS} variable.

• Can you detail the patch that changes the read_ahead_queue_size option to use intermediate uint64_t storage? There was fix: use size_t instead of uint64_t in play_options YAML converter rosbag2#1575 which changed from uint64_t to size_t.

• What are the patches related to precompiled headers, and why were they necessary?

• It's probably best to continue building universal binaries (arm64 + x86_64) unless there is an issue cross-compiling on Apple silicon?