Hi everyone,
-> Hi Laura,
Before I update my mac to Sierra OS X, Apple's latest operating system release, I wanted to check in with any compatibility issues I might encounter. I tried searching the forum and website to see if anyone has addressed this issue and since I haven't found anything, I've decided to post this. I apologize if I did miss a related post that contained the answer.
Psych toolboxVersion
3.0.13 - Flavor: beta - Corresponds to SVN Revision 8129 but is *locally modified* !
For more info visit:
https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3
Mac Version
OS X El Capitan
Version 10.11.6
Graphics Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB
(I'm including the graphics information because I am presenting videos as stimuli and I have already had issues with getting them to play properly. All the bugs have been worked out and my task is running smoothly)
Basically, I don't want to mess up anything by updating to a new OS X platform. Has anyone who has updated had any issues? Has there been any testing with Sierra OS X and PTB-3?
-> I did some basic testing of a recent 10.12 beta release on a 2012 macMini with Intel HD-4000 graphics a few weeks before the 10.12 release. That was done with GNU/Octave-4. I also very lightly tested my main machine, a 2010 MacBookPro via target disc mode, booting it off the macMini. Testing on those two machines showed that things are pretty much unchanged compared to 10.11 El Crapitan.
- Not a single one of the various bugs or problems that cause us trouble since at least OSX 10.9 has been fixed or improved. There is absolutely no new functionality and no improvements whatsoever that would be useful or exciting for Psychtoolbox. At the same time i didn't find serious new bugs or serious problems on the Mac Mini 2012 with Intel HD 4000 gfx. My 2010 MacBookPro is so broken since at least 10.9 that meaningful testing isn't possible, but at least it is not more broken than before fwiw. After an hour of testing it i had enough and lost interest.
- The PsychtoolboxKernelDriver was broken again by Apples incompetent approach to cryptographic driver signing. That was fixed by Cambridge Research Systems upgrading their machine to 10.12 and then re-signing the driver. The next PTB beta release will contain a compatible driver. For users of Intel gfx like you that doesn't matter though, as they can't use the driver on their hardware anyway.
- No testing was done on NVidia gfx (a general troublemaker on many Macs with current OSX versions since at least 10.9) or AMD.
- Octave-4 seems to be a bit flaky / crashy in some situations where it didn't have problems on 10.11, so maybe there is some compatibility problem somewhere between Octave-4 and 10.12. However, the crashes are not related to PTB afaics, but more to things like deleting files or some other GUI actions.
- I didn't test Matlab at all so far, as that is inconvenient on that machine. I received some e-mail from Mathworks customer support that there were (are?) some incompatibilities between Matlab and 10.12 which can cause data corruption, and that they provided some patch to download to fix that. Also that if you downloaded R2016b after 5th October that patch won't be neccessary. I don't have the e-mail anymore, so i don't remember to which Matlab versions it applied.
- Vendors of professional sound hardware and software gave the usual warnings about not upgrading unless they tell their customers, because apparently Apple breaking pro sound functionality with every major OSX release is now the cool new thing.
- Then you can find the usual upgrade horror stories on the Internet, about things failing after an upgrade on the "it just works(tm)" operating system. Google will tell you.
- I can tell you that movie playback doesn't show any obvious problems on the Intel HD 4000 gfx macMini. Of course graphics driver bugs are often specific to a certain model of gpu, so unless somebody has exactly your model of machine and provides feedback, one can't know.
- I will certainly not upgrade my main laptop before 10.12.1 or more likely even 10.12.2 is out. Until then PTB is not officially supported on 10.12. I can't think of any good reason to upgrade though, but then i'm not a Mac fan at all.
- As our online registration server was down the last couple of months i have no idea if or how many labs do already use PTB with 10.12. Maybe others can provide some feedback.
Good luck if you try,
-mario
Thank you. I really appreciate any feedback. Let me know if I need to provide more information.
Best,
Lauren
PEP Studies