[gerlero]

Background: I started this project a few months back now, and I think it is now mature enough that I feel comfortable posting about it here for more users to know. I am grateful to all those who started using it after finding it on GitHub and through users' posts on other sites—including this site—, which helped reach this point.

I made OpenFOAM-v2112.app in an attempt to solve once and for all the problem of getting OpenFOAM up and running on macOS in a straightforward way. The project offers precompiled OpenFOAM binaries (both Intel and Apple silicon), built from the official source code and with the standard dependencies, and installable in a matter of seconds with a single command. For more details, the GitHub repo is at https://github.com/gerlero/openfoam2112-app.

If you want to try it (and you have Homebrew already installed, which is required), just run this command in the terminal:

brew install --no-quarantine gerlero/openfoam/openfoam2112

The --no-quarantine option is there to prevent any dialogs from macOS Gatekeeper, as the distributed binaries have not been notarized by Apple (if you don't include it and get a dialog box on launch, you'll probably need to open a Finder window and right-click>Open the app there to get an option to skip the warning). After installing, either launch the newly-installed OpenFOAM-v2112.app, or run the command:

openfoam2112

to start an OpenFOAM session, running natively on your Mac.

If you're curious on how this all works, the entire automated build process is obviously open-source and available in the project’s repo.

I hope that this project can be of help to more Mac & OpenFOAM users, and ask you to try it out and spread the word about it (and give it a star on GitHub, why not?) if you find it useful. Thanks!

[gerlero]

I've moved this project to https://github.com/gerlero/openfoam-app. OpenFOAM v2206 binaries are now available too.

[Miguel Hernandez]

Compared to running openFoam on docker, are there differences in terms of performance?

[olesen]

I don't have MacOS etc, but do make sure you are using ARM64 binaries for the docker images.

[Miguel Hernandez]

Originally Posted by olesen

I don't have MacOS etc, but do make sure you are using ARM64 binaries for the docker images.

Yes, that is what I meant. I use ARM64 binaries for the docker images. I would like to know if there is any difference between this or using the app mentioned in this tread...

[gerlero]

A quick test hints at the native build of OpenFOAM being a little faster:

Here are the runtimes of $FOAM_TUTORIALS/incompressible/simpleFoam/pitzDaily I see on an M1 MacBook Air...

OpenFOAM-v2112.app
real 0m5.494s
user 0m5.344s
sys 0m0.142s

ARM-based v2112 Docker image from https://github.com/gerlero/openfoam-docker-arm (using Docker Desktop for Mac with default settings)
real 0m9.424s
user 0m6.039s
sys 0m0.346s

This is just a single test, on a single machine, so bear that in mind... all in all, there are various considerations in the native vs. Docker discussion, including integration with the native OS (favors native), guaranteed compatibility with GCC-based Linux builds (favors Docker), virtualization (CPU, RAM, filesystem access, storage) overhead (favors native), ease of use (IMO favors native).

[alamocfd]

I am using M1 Max and installed from https://github.com/gerlero/openfoam-app, but i cant get cfMesh functions to run, constantly getting this error:

symbol not found in flat namespace (__ZN4Foam10FatalErrorE)
Abort trap: 6


Anyway to fix this?

[gerlero]

Could you post the steps to reproduce that error? When you get that message, do the other OpenFOAM binaries (e.g. the solvers) work?

Also, are you using the latest version of the app? cfMesh was broken before OpenFOAM.app v1.8.2 (see bug report at https://github.com/gerlero/openfoam-app/issues/88) with a similar linker error.

[alamocfd]

I couldn't figure what went wrong, but after reinstalling it's working fine now. Thank you

[Miguel Hernandez]

Hi, I've installed the app OpenFOAM v2112 (arm) provided in the GitHub page... Every time I use mpirun, at the end of the calculation, I have this message:

A system call failed during shared memory initialization that should
not have.  It is likely that your MPI job will now either abort or
experience performance degradation.

  Local host:  Mac-Studio.wind3.hub
  System call: unlink(2) /var/folders/tm/s0frtvjs3qbbb0q5m8d12s8w0000gn/T//ompi.Mac-Studio.501/pid.2398/1/vader_segment.Mac-Studio.501.bc4e0001.12
  Error:       No such file or directory (errno 2)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Mac-Studio.wind3.hub:02398] 2 more processes have sent help message help-opal-shmem-mmap.txt / sys call fail
[Mac-Studio.wind3.hub:02398] Set MCA parameter "orte_base_help_aggregate" to 0 to see all help / error messages

Any idea?

[gerlero]

Looks like $TMPDIR truncation as discussed in this open GitHub issue on the Open MPI project. A fix/workaround mentioned there is this.

In any case, does OpenFOAM work anyway regardless of this message?

I'm pretty sure I have seen this message before in my logs, but I haven't observed any negative effects. It would be ideal for this to be fixed in Open MPI itself, but I'm also willing to also consider a fix or workaround (either the one I mentioned, or something better) if it makes sense and doesn't break anything else.

[Miguel Hernandez]

Originally Posted by gerlero

Looks like $TMPDIR truncation as discussed in this open GitHub issue on the Open MPI project. A fix/workaround mentioned there is this.

In any case, does OpenFOAM work anyway regardless of this message?

I'm pretty sure I have seen this message before in my logs, but I haven't observed any negative effects. It would be ideal for this to be fixed in Open MPI itself, but I'm also willing to also consider a fix or workaround (either the one I mentioned, or something better) if it makes sense and doesn't break anything else.

Yes, openFOAM works anyway. However, I don't know if it works at slow performance

[gerlero]

Originally Posted by Miguel Hernandez

Yes, openFOAM works anyway. However, I don't know if it works at slow performance

Do you happen to have a case where this message shows up consistently or often? If you are able to try the workaround I linked before, that could give a clearer answer as to whether there's any actual performance degradation due to this.

My previous comment on having seen this message before notwithstanding (I have seen this message before), I recently tried to reproduce this a few times on my machine but couldn't get the message to appear.

[Miguel Hernandez]

Originally Posted by gerlero

Do you happen to have a case where this message shows up consistently or often? If you are able to try the workaround I linked before, that could give a clearer answer as to whether there's any actual performance degradation due to this.

My previous comment on having seen this message before notwithstanding (I have seen this message before), I recently tried to reproduce this a few times on my machine but couldn't get the message to appear.

It doesn't happen every time... just some times...

[Miguel Hernandez]

Gelero, do you have any news about the new openFoam version, v2212? Have you planned a new version of the app to natively run this release?

Thanks for your work.

[gerlero]

Originally Posted by Miguel Hernandez

Gelero, do you have any news about the new openFoam version, v2212? Have you planned a new version of the app to natively run this release?

Thanks for your work.

Yes! It's not just planned; the current versions already include OpenFOAM v2212.

[Miguel Hernandez]

Great, thank you for your work!

[Akthem]

Originally Posted by alamocfd

I couldn't figure what went wrong, but after reinstalling it's working fine now. Thank you

I installed openFOAM v2206 following https://github.com/gerlero/homebrew-openfoam on my mac m2. I did preliminary tests successfully. I am trying to install cfmesh v1.1.2 and the ./allwmake command is returning a lot of warnings and errors.

Further, I tried to install cfmesh for CFD-OF workbench in freecad, and I get a lot of errors too.

I thought you might help since you are a step ahead and have cfmesh on your m1 max. Could you please guide me through the steps you followed to install/make cfmesh on your mac?

[Akthem]

Hi Gelero, I was wondering if you had a go with EOF-Library. I am trying to install it on the mac after successfully installing elmerFEM and brewing openFOAM.

This github issue has more details: https://github.com/jvencels/EOF-Library/issues/11

Please let me know if you had a previous go with this or if you have a solution to make it work on the mac silicon.

Thank you for the amazing openFOAM work.

[gerlero]

No, not really. I took a look at the error you're seeing though (on the GitHub issue you link); could it be that you need to activate/source OpenFOAM before running the command? (https://github.com/gerlero/openfoam-app#-use)