Make OCW Studio work on M1 Macs

[ChristopherChudzicki]

At least a few of us working on OCW Studio have M1 macbooks. Currently, OCW Studio does not work on m1 macbooks without modifying files that are committed to github. (namely, M1 people need to use the rdclda/concourse:7.7.1 concourse image.)

Acceptance Criteria:

• OCW Studio should be able to run on M1 makes without modifying files that are tracked by git.
• Any changes should not affect non-m1 users.

[ChristopherChudzicki]

Related:

• @pt2302 did some work toward this in Use registry-image in concourse pipelines #1553
• @gumaerc wrote in Slack after investigating with @pt2302 and I:

  With the custom arm64 Concourse image that we're using on M1, when you ssh into the box and look at the CPU architecture, it's running aarch64 natively. When you ssh into any of the workers though, they're running x86_64. In our experience this has led to some weird bugginess, but Paul was able to get the job we were trying to run to work after a reboot, so it seems intermittent that there are issues with it. Since the Concourse container in docker is running in aarch64, but not directly in macOS and through Docker Desktop, it doesn't utilize Rosetta 2 when it runs x86_64 code. That's our theory anyway. After some Googling around I found this which indicates that Apple is adding support for running Intel binaries in VM's as part of macOS Ventura, and Docker plans on supporting that as soon as it's available:

  • [Docker Desktop for Mac] - Support for running x86-64 binaries with Rosetta 2 docker/roadmap#384
  • [Apple article about running Intel binaries in VMs](
    Docker roadmap post

This situation may get better on its own, but in the meantime the only thing that is preventing us from running ocw-studio on M1 without needing to modify VCS-tracked files¹ is that we track docker-compose.overrides.yml in git, and there seems not to be any good reason to.

We should just commit a single docker-compose file, stop tracking the overrides file, and people can use overrides for local testing.

Footnotes

1. Actually, you probably can run on M1 mac without changing committed files, but it's annoying. You'd need a third override file, at which point docker compose up becomes docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.overrides.yml -f <my-custom-m1-overrides> up ↩