Investigate support of macOS 10.14

[marnovo]

With the upcoming macOS 10.14 (Mojave) in the next weeks/months, there will be a fair amout of people eager to update from their older versions given all the new features.

However, it is very likely that, being 10.14 a new major update (despite being minor according to semantic versioning), previous support will be broken. Hopefully this means less work than more work to make NVIDIA eGPUs a reality on macOS.

Therefore research on running eGPU + NVIDIA + CUDA on top of macOS 10.14 and updates to the repository are necessary.

[marnovo]

Some preliminary info available at:

• https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/macos-10-14-mojave-beta/

[marnovo]

More good news:

• https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/two-new-egpu-solutions-on-macos-10-13-4-pure-efi-and-hybrid/

[marnovo]

"Official" topic from NVIDIA/latest news on macOS 10.14 Mojave NVIDIA web drivers: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1042279/?comment=5286813

10/18 Update:

Developers using Macs with NVIDIA graphics cards are reporting that after upgrading from 10.13 to 10.14 (Mojave) they are experiencing rendering regressions and slow performance.
Apple fully control drivers for Mac OS. But if Apple allows, our engineers are ready and eager to help Apple deliver great drivers for Mac OS 10.14 (Mojave).

Apple's recently released macOS 10.14 (Mojave) does not support CUDA. For CUDA developers who are on macOS 10.13, it is recommended to not upgrade to Mojave. Developers may not be able to use Xcode 10 to build GPU applications or run CUDA applications. Both macOS 10.13.6 and Xcode 9.4 support CUDA and work great with CUDA 10. NVIDIA is working with Apple to get Mojave to support CUDA.
CUDA Product Management

#1
Posted 09/28/2018 11:21 PM

[marnovo]

More info regarding Apple's macOS 10.14 Mojave x NVIDIA web drivers--and very upset users: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2018/12/11/apple-turns-its-back-on-customers-and-nvidia-with-macos-mojave/

[ZhiquanW]

Is is possible that apple will not support CUDA even in the later version?

[Nick-Harvey]

I really hope this gets addressed! Lots of developers looking to do AI/ML development need this to work.

[marnovo]

The "political" deadlock is still on between NVIDIA and Apple, unfortunately.

I have been following the discussions around this last month and although there are some workarounds available, they focus on much simpler compatibility than actual hardware acceleration & CUDA (see post). Sadly, it could be that there's a driver ready for months already but the standoff keeps it unavailable (see post).

There are some renewed hopes for a community-driven compatibility layer as Apple announced a DriverKit API alongside macOS 10.15 Catalina, but these may fall short if the support is merely at user (not kernel) level. More info on: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1042520/drivers/-when-will-the-nvidia-web-drivers-be-released-for-macos-mojave-10-14-/86

In terms of pressure towards Apple dropping the fight and accepting NVIDIA back again, there's a 16k+ signatures online petition and the newly announced, more modular & pro-focused Mac Pro could be another vector, but I wouldn't hold my breath until year-end.