[Discuss-gnuradio] macOS Mojave 10.14 and GNU Radio / UHD / Volk

[Michael Dickens]

Apple's latest OSX, macOS Mojave 10.14, was officially released on September 
24, 2018 -- just under a month ago. I've been running the public beta for a few 
months on a separate partition to make sure GR / UHD / Volk work on this new 
release ... and, the good news is that that they do!

There has been very little discussion (at least that I've seen or heard of) in 
any of our various forums about macOS Mojave 10.14 and issues with GNU Radio / 
UHD / Volk, which either indicates the lack of interest / users or the fact 
that they mostly work out of the box .. or, truth be told, probably more of the 
latter but somewhere in between ;)

The primary point of issue that I know of is that the default PyQt4 Qt4 
rendering configuration is "raster", which for some reason results in the GUI 
window flashing a lot & sometimes being unresponsive. The solution is to create 
or edit the file `~/.gnuradio/config.conf` and add (or tweak) the following:
{{{
[qtgui]
style = native
}}}
or use `opengl` if that works. The default is "raster", which is the fastest 
and, generally, the most compatible, but for some reason this setting is borked 
on macOS Mojave 10.14. For me, "native" works but "opengl" doesn't. No idea why 
& it's not worth my time tracking down the issue since we're moving to Qt5 in 
the 3.8 release -- and thus away from Qt4 except for legacy support -- and Qt5 
should provide between rendering compatibility for OSX (both newer and older).

The primary limitation of moving to macOS Mojave 10.14 is that the new Xcode 10 
does not provide 32-bit build support (macOS Mojave 10.14 itself still provides 
32-bit runtime compatibility in its libraries). One can use an older macOS SDK 
to get this support for the purposes of building as 32-bit, but any resulting 
binaries may not function on macOS Mojave 10.14 due to API and/or ABI changes. 
I really don't think this is a major issue for most folks.

So, if you're into OSX, GR / UHD / Volk can be made to play nicely with them 
without too much compromise or extra work. Cheers! - MLD