Hi folks,

can you please tell me when there will be a NEW Universal Binary version of BOINC? The "old" Screensaver won't run on the new INTEL iMac!!! :-(

Hoping for positive answer
Gerry

can you please tell me when there will be a NEW Universal Binary version of BOINC? The "old" Screensaver won't run on the new INTEL iMac!!! :-(

So far I know, are the Intel Mac binaries in work.
It is not posible to make a universal binary for MacOS on PPC and MacOS on Intel. So there will be a MacOS Intel and a different MacOS PPC binary.

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So far I know, are the Intel Mac binaries in work.

well, I downloaded 5.3.16 lately and its still PPC only ... the problem is, that the BOINCsaver also is a PPC Screensaver and Rosetta does not support PPC screensavers! :-(

Thats why I NEED a UNIVERSAL BINARY Screensaver for BOINC!!!

rgds G

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So far I know, are the Intel Mac binaries in work.

well, I downloaded 5.3.16 lately and its still PPC only ... the problem is, that the BOINCsaver also is a PPC Screensaver and Rosetta does not support PPC screensavers! :-(
Thats why I NEED a UNIVERSAL BINARY Screensaver for BOINC!!!

I don't understand, what you mean with a universal binary. - You could not let PPC binaries on a Intel x86 architecture, and vice versa. So it is not posible to make a universal binary.
A recompile (port) from the boinc and the science app to the Intel architecture is needed. This port to Mac on Intel is still under work at berkely, and not available for download in the moment. All the binaries on the boinc and seti servers for MacOS are for MacOS on PPC !
Also you need a seperate binary for rosetta@home compiled on and for the Intel MacOS, too.

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A recompile (port) from the boinc and the science app to the Intel architecture is needed. This port to Mac on Intel is still under work at berkely, and not available for download in the moment.

Hi Dotsch,

yep thats exactly my question ...
I know that there is a port to make. But there will not be a PPC AND an extra Intel version ... it will be UNIVERSAL BINARY (working for PPC AND Intel).
I know that the guys are working on it, and my question is (was) if someone knows WHEN this new COMBINED version will be available :-)

rgds G

yep thats exactly my question ...
I know that there is a port to make. But there will not be a PPC AND an extra Intel version ... it will be UNIVERSAL BINARY (working for PPC AND Intel).
I know that the guys are working on it, and my question is (was) if someone knows WHEN this new COMBINED version will be available :-)

So far I know, is it planed to make a seperate binaries for PPC and Intel.
And how do you wan't to let PPC binaries run on Intel hardware and vice versa ? - I think it is not posible. - But can you gave some more technical details, how the will be solved.
Where do you heared that there will be a universal binary ?

HP has a simliar thing for HPUX on the IA64. So you can let run PARISC binaries on IA64. But there is a special mode on the IA64 CPUs, whith a compatibily mode on HPUX. The effect is, that these emulation of PARISC binaries decrease the performance by 5 to 8 times, deppending on the application (seti performance is realy bad ! - the cause, why I made a special IA64 binary).

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So far I know, is it planed to make a seperate binaries for PPC and Intel.
And how do you wan't to let PPC binaries run on Intel hardware and vice versa ? - I think it is not posible. - But can you gave some more technical details, how the will be solved.
Where do you heared that there will be a universal binary ?

Hi Dotsch,

well, as I already own an INTEL iMac I know that all software developers are doing UNIVERSAL Binaries. Within these files (which are a little bit bigger than a "normal" PPC file) are BOTH codes neccessary for PPC AND INTEL. When Apple switches from 68xxx to PowerPC Platform they did the same! These files were called "FAT" and hat both codes in it. If I open e.g. iTunes the Finder says "Kind: Application (Universal) which means that iTunes can run on PPC AND INTEL platform. Programs which are still programmed as "PPC only" have to use ROSETTA (provided by Apple) which translates the code from PPC to Intel. The only problem is, that ROSETTA does NOT support some things (e.g. PPC Screensavers, PPC PreferencePanes, some Java-things and so on). Therefore I CAN use BOINC (in the PPC version, because it is translated by ROSETTA) but NOT the BOINCsaver because it is a PPC screensaver NOT translated by ROSETTA ...

Is it clearer for you now?

Have a nice day
Gerry

Is it clearer for you now?

Yes. Thank you for the detailed explanations. Did the Rosetta impact performance ?
I am not so famliar with MacOS, because I am a UNIXer.
Sorry, I thought you mean with rosetta the rosetta@home project. - It is also a distributed computing project.

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[quote]Did the Rosetta impact performance ?

Well, the 2GHz DualCore iMac is pretty faster than my old G4@1GHz so i can't really tell how much impact it has ...
But for sure it takes much performance to retranslate the codes on the fly ...

rgds
Gerry

Hi Dotsch,

There is a performance hit. Basically, you can say it is a fast a G5 single core.
But, usually a little faster.

Is it clearer for you now?

Yes. Thank you for the detailed explanations. Did the Rosetta impact performance ?
I am not so famliar with MacOS, because I am a UNIXer.
Sorry, I thought you mean with rosetta the rosetta@home project. - It is also a distributed computing project.

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Keith J. Schultz
schultzk@uni-trier.de

Try the commandline version! Another trick you might try is try setting the bit
to force run with rosetta on the screensaver. This has work with some screensavers!! As Always use AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!!!

[quote]Did the Rosetta impact performance ?

Well, the 2GHz DualCore iMac is pretty faster than my old G4@1GHz so i can't really tell how much impact it has ...
But for sure it takes much performance to retranslate the codes on the fly ...

rgds
Gerry

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Keith J. Schultz
schultzk@uni-trier.de

can you please tell me when there will be a NEW Universal Binary version of BOINC? The "old" Screensaver won't run on the new INTEL iMac!!! :-(

So far I know, are the Intel Mac binaries in work.
It is not posible to make a universal binary for MacOS on PPC and MacOS on Intel. So there will be a MacOS Intel and a different MacOS PPC binary.

A 'Universal Binary' does indeed contain the executable binaries for both PPC and Intel versions of the Mac OS. These Web sites have more information:

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/adoptinguniversalbinaries.html
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/universal_binary/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40002217

Also, you could just Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=mac+os+x+universal+binary&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

- Rich

Another trick you might try is try setting the bit
to force run with rosetta on the screensaver.

Hi Keith,

sorry for asking ... what do you mean by that? Which bit? Can you please explain that a little bit more detailed for me? (as your mail-address is from germany maybe you could also answer in German if it makes the things easier (I am from Austria)! ;-)

thanks
Gerry

Hi Gerry,
I only know the theory. I have read it somewhere on the net!
I do not have a Intel-Mac yet. I am waiting for a 17" Macbook
to come out.

O.K. here goes. In the finder open the information panel. Somewhere
on the panel is a check box that will allow to set
the bit to tell the OS to run an application with
rosseta and not natively. That all to it.

I may be in Germany, but I am a born American with dual citizenship.
My German would make your toes curl. Besides as you are Autrian and I
German should we be talking to each other !?? ;-))

As you might have noticed I am in Trier. I you like e-mail me.
German or English/American is fine.

Bis Bald
Keith.

Another trick you might try is try setting the bit
to force run with rosetta on the screensaver.

Hi Keith,

sorry for asking ... what do you mean by that? Which bit? Can you please explain that a little bit more detailed for me? (as your mail-address is from germany maybe you could also answer in German if it makes the things easier (I am from Austria)! ;-)

thanks
Gerry

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Keith J. Schultz
schultzk@uni-trier.de

In the finder open the information panel. Somewhere
on the panel is a check box that will allow to set the bit to tell the OS to run an application with rosseta and not natively. That all to it.

Hi Keith,

well Ichecked the infopanel but I couldn't find any settings regarding using Rosetta or not ...

schönes Wochenende
Gerry

This is covered on another thread. HERE.

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Nathan Zamprogno
http://baliset.blogspot.com

This is covered on another thread. HERE.

Hi John,

thanks for the link ... I will monitor the news in the mentioned thread!

greetings
Gerry

This is straight from the horses mouth. Charlie Fenton is *the* developer of the Intel version of BOINC for Macs. I posted some questions on the official BOINC mailing list and he's responded comprehensively. Many, many thanks to Charlie.

My comments and Charlie's responses are below, mixed together. Sorry if the breaks between my questions and his responses are not obvious, this is a direct cut and paste from his email to me.




At 4:09 PM +1100 2/15/06, Nathan Zamprogno wrote:
1. Who is responsible for developing the Intel Specific or Universal binary of BOINC? Is there a version roadmap or timeline for even a beta release?

I am currently testing fully working "universal binary" development builds of BOINC Manager, command-line BOINC client and the boinc_cmd command-line tool. All future releases of BOINC will include "universal binary" builds for the Macintosh. (Universal binaries contain both PowerPC and Intel executables in one file; the Macintosh OS automatically selects the appropriate one for that computer.)

The BOINC team is working hard to get all the BOINC code ready for the next alpha test release; the issues which need to be resolved before this release are not specific to the Mac platform. The next version of BOINC needs to pass alpha test before we can fully release it.

We will soon be recruiting alpha testers for the Macintosh platforms, both PowerPC and Intel.

As Eric Korpela correctly wrote,
SETI@home currently has a MacOS X/Intel binary (see
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/apps.php), but you'd need an intel
aware BOINC client to run it. So far as I know there is no intel
BOINC binary available for download.

My tests show that the current PowerPC builds of both BOINC and the project applications run perfectly on Intel Macs under Apple's Rosetta emulation, though more slowly. My tests indicate that the PowerPC build of SETI@home takes about 3 times as long to run on an Intel Mac as does the Intel native build of SETI@home. A PowerPC build of SETI@home takes about 7.5 hours per work unit on a 2GHz dual-core Intel iMac, as opposed to about 2.5 hours for a native Intel build.

At 4:09 PM +1100 2/15/06, Nathan Zamprogno wrote:
2. Obviously BOINCManager is a fully fledged double-clickable application, and thus will either need to be native to Intel or will run under Rosetta. But what about the command line only version of BOINC? Does code that executes from a command line fall into the "must be rewritten for Intel" basket? Is "Universal Binary-ness" only a feature needed in full OS-X programs with menus and windows? Will the current CLI version run as a background process and will it use Rosetta or run "natively" on Intel hardware?

Nothing needs to be rewritten, only recompiled. This applies to all executables, both GUI and command-line. But all BOINC executables written for PowerPC Macs run correctly on Intel Macs using Apple's Rosetta emulation.

What about CLI versions meant for Linux on Intel systems (that is, Wintel hardware). Would that work or crash?

I have not tried this, but I am fairly certain they will not run. OS X is a UNIX system, not Linux. They are similar but not interchangeable.

3. Regardless of how BOINC is running, as Intel native or under Rosetta emulation, what about the code received from BOINC projects themselves? When I start up SETI@Home on a new BOINC client I note it downloads "setiathome 4.18" as well as a few workunits. Does this file contain platform specific code or optimisations or is it "universal" (meaning the same project code file is downloaded irrespective of platform it is run on, kind of like Java?) Do BOINC project writers need to change anything at their end so their projects will run on the "new" platform?

The advantage of "universal binaries" is that you only need to have one copy of the application, and it will run on either PowerPC or Intel Macs, so users don't need to choose between two options. Since BOINC participants manually download BOINC from the web site, we will be providing BOINC in "universal binary" form.

However, participants do not manually download project applications; this is done automatically by BOINC. So there would be no advantage to combining the Intel and PowerPC versions in a single "universal binary" file, but doing so would double the size of the download.

So BOINC treats Intel Macs as a new, separate platform. BOINC previously directly supported four platforms: PowerPC Macs (powerpc-apple-darwin), Intel Linux (i686-pc-linux-gnu), Windows (windows-intelx86) and Solaris (sparc-sun-solaris2.7). We have now added a fifth platform for Intel Macs (i686-apple-darwin).

At this time, only SETI@home has a project application available for the i686-apple-darwin platform, but we are working with the other projects which support the Mac powerpc-apple-darwin platform to help them build a native Intel version.

As a temporary measure, projects can provide a copy of their PowerPC application under the new powerpc-apple-darwin platform. But it will run more slowly than a native Intel build, and screensaver graphics don't work when running a PowerPC project application with a native Intel build of BOINC Manager / BOINC screensaver.

The screensaver graphics _do_ work properly on Intel Macs when running a PowerPC project application with PowerPC BOINC, or when running an Intel project application with Intel (universal binary) BOINC.

If the current version of BOINC runs in Rosetta, I'm expecting the performance to be cripplingly slow, although advice from someone who's tried will be welcome.

It's actually better than I had expected.

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Nathan Zamprogno
http://baliset.blogspot.com

Hi Gerry,

Sorry for the late reply. Like I said before, I have just read about
these things. I can not even tell you where I have read about this!
Possibly, Starry Night forums, MachInTouch I can not be sure.

But, as I see it things are looking up. Boinc runs without the
problems just slower and I think the Intel-Macers can live without
a screen saver! ;-))

Schick mir mal ein E-Mail Ich hätte gerne dein Meinung zu neuen Macs.

Gruss
Keith.

In the finder open the information panel. Somewhere
on the panel is a check box that will allow to set the bit to tell the OS to run an application with rosseta and not natively. That all to it.

Hi Keith,

well Ichecked the infopanel but I couldn't find any settings regarding using Rosetta or not ...

schönes Wochenende
Gerry

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Keith J. Schultz
schultzk@uni-trier.de

Hurrraaaa!

Boinc 5.3.21 Universal Binary released ... works fast and the Screensaver is working again too!

Gerry

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