Fluid objects crashing Mac

Hi,

I’m experiencing instant crashes on a 12-core Mac Pro running Mojave 10.14.6 and Max 8.1.11. Everything is working on a MacBook pro with the same OS and Max versions but Max instantly crashes on the desktop machine when opening a patch with any Flucoma objects or if I call one of them in a patcher. The crash logs also point towards Flucoma objects but I can’t really read them to know anything specific.

Any help or similar issues? Thanks!

Hi @5ibl1, sorry to hear you’re having problems.

If you could send one of the crash reports that would help us diagnose things better. However, the mostly likely explanation is that your Mac pro doesn’t support AVX instructions. One way to test this is to open Terminal and run

sysctl -a | grep machdep.cpu.features

On my machine, for instance, I get this alphabet soup. You’ll see ‘AVX1.0’ near the end. If you don’t see that on your machine, then this is the culprit.

FPU VME DE PSE TSC MSR PAE MCE CX8 APIC SEP MTRR PGE MCA CMOV PAT PSE36 CLFSH DS ACPI 
MMX FXSR SSE SSE2 SS HTT TM PBE SSE3 PCLMULQDQ DTES64 MON DSCPL VMX EST TM2 SSSE3 
FMA CX16 TPR PDCM SSE4.1 SSE4.2 x2APIC MOVBE POPCNT AES PCID XSAVE OSXSAVE SEGLIM64 
TSCTMR AVX1.0 RDRAND F16C

Thanks for your answer. That’s right, my computer doesn’t seem to support AVX instructions.

I guess the support for non-AVX computers won’t be added to FluCoMa?

FluCoMa objects can be compiled without AVX on and they will be slower but definitely will work. How command-line friendly are you?

J

Not at all friendly but I could give it a try if it’s possible to make it work. I would need some help to get started with the compiling.

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Happy to try and get you going!

First: We’ll need to get you equipped with

  1. a compiler
  2. a program called CMake, which we use to manage the build processes.
  3. a program called Git, which we use for version control
  4. the Max SDK

Compiler

The first order of business (and maybe the hardest) is getting the xcode command line tools installed. I’m assuming you have little use for xcode itself (which is a very large install), so we’ll see if we can get you set up with just the terminal stuff (which is tiny).

This might work, and if it does is the quickest way. Open terminal and run

xcode-select --install 

If that doesn’t work, then you might end up needing an Apple Developer account (free) to manually download.

  • The xcode version compatible with 10.14.6 is 11.3 (according to this)
  • Which can be downloaded from here (requires login)

CMake

The easiest way to install this (IMO) is via something called homebrew, which is a package manager for all kinds of useful command line tools. So, first one needs to install homebrew by running this terminal command:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Then, once it’s installed, start a new terminal window and use homebrew to install cmake:

brew install cmake 

Git

Can be installed via homebrew as well:

brew install git 

Max SDK

Can be downloaded directly from here. Unzip it somewhere, (bearing in mind that you’ll need to type its location later, when compiling!)

I have mine in my Max packages folder but you don’t have to (and locations without spaces in the name are simpler to deal with on the command line)


One you have these bits installed, we should be able to get going with a build

1 Like