[ci] Run iOS drive master tests on Apple Silicon

[jmagman]

In the master drive tests use --enable-software-rendering flag implemented in flutter/flutter#105161

Part of flutter/flutter#104523
See also #5794 and #5693

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[jmagman]

@fkorotkov the Run drive step seems to be stuck, it's taking ~4 minutes on x64 but is at 40 minutes with no logs.
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/6181157610979328
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/5618207657558016
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/6744107564400640
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/4518696029782016

Any idea what's up here?

cc @stuartmorgan

[fkorotkov]

Seems like the same hanging symptoms like before. Will try to reproduce locally like before but since you are forcing not to use Metal inside the simulator it means the GPU is crashing when simulator's UI is rendered. Seems like the problem is isolated to the outside of Flutter's environment inside the simulator.

Which means that the original workaround might be a better option. Just add the following command as the first line in create_simulator_script. @stuartmorgan what do you think?

defaults write com.apple.CoreSimulator.IndigoFramebufferServices FramebufferRendererHint 3

[stuartmorgan]

Seems worth trying.

Is there a longer term strategy to address this problem? Relying on an undocumented default is fragile; it could break in any simulator update. Is there a a Radar we can reference in a comment on this hack?

[fkorotkov]

Yes, I reported it in FB10025528 and even got some responses from the Apple devs to provide some extra data.

Also once macOS Ventura will go in public beta it will be worth to try testing it as well. Apple is improving the Virtualization.Framework quite a bit in Ventura.

[jmagman]

Which means that the original workaround might be a better option. Just add the following command as the first line in create_simulator_script. @stuartmorgan what do you think?

defaults write com.apple.CoreSimulator.IndigoFramebufferServices FramebufferRendererHint 3

Reverted the --enable-software-rendering change, trying FramebufferRendererHint

[stuartmorgan]

It seems like if anything it's even worse now.

[fkorotkov]

@stuartmorgan seems the same. Let me see what could change since May 26th.

[fkorotkov]

I have good news and bad news. I was able to get a hold on a support engineer from Apple who looked into my report and talked to the people behind Virtualization.Framework and related stuff internally.

Bad news is that they don't believe that IndigoFramebufferServices does anything. It seems I was wrong and got a wrong impression that the command passed. I think I might have copy/pasted a command for macos tests instead of ios or something like that.

The support engineer asked me a bit more questions but his general suggestion and a message from the rest of the team was to try out macOS Ventura.

So I tried the private beta of Ventura with the current stable Xcode 13.4.1 and everything worked. This time I've tripple checked that I was running the right ./script/tool_runner.sh drive-examples --ios command and not --macos. I repeated the experiment several times in fresh VMs and every time it passed.

Unfortunately it seems we don't have other options but to wait for macOS Ventura Public Beta in a month or so (I don't think we can legally use macOS Ventura for public CI while it's in private beta). On a bright side we found the issue with master -> main mirroring which caused unwanted builds and we also dropped prices on both old and new macOS instances. Sorry about this blocker. We are doing some bleeding edge stuff here after all.

[jmagman]

Closing.