Apple Silicon release binaries

[michaelsproul]

Description

We should provide ARM binaries for macOS, to run on M1, M2, M3. Currently this niche is filled by Homebrew, which is somewhat out of our control & hard to update promptly (e.g. v5.1.1 is still waiting to be merged: Homebrew/homebrew-core#165799).

Steps to resolve

Option 1: Self-hosting

We add an Apple Silicon server to our infrastructure and build on that.

Option 2: Github Actions

We build the binary on an Apple Silicon Github runner. These were not available until recently.

It seems that Github charges quite a lot for M1 runners (they are not included in the free tier), so we're probably better off with option 1.

https://docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-billing-for-github-actions/about-billing-for-github-actions#per-minute-rates

[michaelsproul]

ARM runners are now included in the free Github actions plans, so we could try building release binaries there.

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-github-hosted-runners/using-github-hosted-runners/about-github-hosted-runners#standard-github-hosted-runners-for-public-repositories

We would add an entry here alongside the x86_64 entry for macOS

lighthouse/.github/workflows/release.yml

Lines 44 to 46 in 54f7bc5

	- arch: x86_64-apple-darwin
	runner: macos-13
	profile: maxperf

Testing can be done on a fork by pushing a random tag (e.g. v100.0.0). It's best to delete these tags after they've been used (so they don't make their way into other people's local repos when they fetch)

[michaelsproul]

@chong-he is going to take a look at this!

[michaelsproul]

Resolved by:

• Add ARM binary for macOS in release #7416

ARM binaries for MacOS will be part of v7.1.0!