Open3d-devel support for macOS arm64 Apple Silicon, please

[crosswick]

Checklist

• I have searched for similar issues.
• For Python issues, I have tested with the latest development wheel.
• I have checked the release documentation and the latest documentation (for master branch).

Proposed new feature or change

self-explanatory, please see issue title

References

#6334 (comment)

Additional information

No response

[ssheorey]

Hi @crosswick this depends on the availability of macOS Apple Silicon machines in Github as CI runners. They aren't available yet, but they are on the Github roadmap.

[sitic]

Github actions has M1 runners now, but they aren't free:

actions/runner-images#8439 (comment)

Will M1 runners be available for free for public projects? I just tried to use it and got:

The job was not started because recent account payments have failed or your spending limit needs to be increased. Please check the 'Billing & plans' section in your settings.

This will happen but the date is TBD. GitHub is responsible for the provisioning of all Mac hardware in Azure data centers. Our team is ramping up capacity in preparation for GA in Jan-Mar 2024 timeframe. Once we reach the GA milestone, we will start working on additional plans to support open source, along with new macOS runners.

@ssheorey is open3d using paid runners currently?

[ssheorey]

No, free runners for open source projects.

[kgantchev]

No, free runners for open source projects.

Might I make a suggestion? Feel free to use FlyCI's more powerful M2 runners. Our runners are on average 2x faster and 2x cheaper than GitHub's AND we have a free tier for OSS projects (see below).

Just install the FlyCI GitHub app and update the runs-on flag:

jobs:
  ci:
-    runs-on: macos-latest
+    runs-on: flyci-macos-large-latest-m2
    steps:
      - name: 👀 Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

If your repo is public, then FlyCI offers 500 mins/month of free M1 runner usage with the flyci-macos-large-latest-m2 runner.