AFNI and SUMA GUI are black after macOS Tahoe update

AFNI Message Board
,
21

Hi @fmrihead and @kellymacniven,

Daniel's macos_x11_suma branch continues to make updates for suma on this side, but those SUMA_XErrHandler and GLXBadContext errors from suma are a different matter. Daniel and I were just looking into that, since one of my systems had the same problem, and we seem to have a solution, or a set of them (mostly done by Daniel).

It seems like some settings under X11 can get corrupted, and it might be enough to simply rewrite them. Start by noting your current setting for enable_iglx, and then probably setting it to zero (make note of the output from the first (read) command):

defaults read org.xquartz.X11 enable_iglx
defaults write org.xquartz.X11 enable_iglx 0

Does running suma work after this?
If not, try modifying the value, and even resetting it (which we ended up doing):

defaults write org.xquartz.X11 enable_iglx 1
defaults write org.xquartz.X11 enable_iglx 0
suma

If that does not work, the other step that we did was reinstalling the mesa packages, though it seems like this should not matter:

brew reinstall mesa mesa-glu

We expect that reinstalling XQuartz would also solve this, but hopefully resetting that enable_iglx variable is sufficient.

If you try this, please let us know how it goes.

Thanks,
-rick

22

Hi @adam.steel,

Since we won't have worry about the other GLX issue from this thread, it seems like now we should just go through this together. I will send you a private message about that.

Thanks,

-rick

23

Hi folks, I'm experiencing a similar issue, where (i) SUMA is black when I initially open it, and the brain only appears if I resize the window and (ii, more important to me) the surface controller isn't displaying the color bar even though the surface dset coloration looks normal.

I'm running MacOS Tahoe (26.3) with an M5 Pro chip, and my afni -ver output is:
Precompiled binary macos_13_ARM: Apr 28 2026 (Version AFNI_26.1.00 'Balbinus')

To fix this issue, I've have tried:

defaults read org.xquartz.X11 enable_iglx
defaults write org.xquartz.X11 enable_iglx 0

as well as reinstalling the mesa packages, using homebrew to install openmotif, libomp and gsl, and restarting my computer.

Is there anything else I should try to resolve this? Thanks very much for any help.

for nih messageboard
for nih messageboard1370×1202 68.4 KB

24

Since there is a new issue from mesa that might be at play, would you please provide the first ~20 lines of text output from running suma?

Thanks,

-rick

25

We have spent some time looking into various fixes for this new problem with updated versions of mesa causing suma to show blank windows on the MacOS. This is a completely different issue than the resizing issue of Tahoe (MacOS v.26) and can affect earlier Sequoia (MacOS v.15) release also with both Intel and ARM architectures. The problem is limited to suma, which makes use of the OpenGL libraries from mesa.

The longest-term solution we found is to use a homebrew "tap", copy of an older version of mesa. Thanks to @pmolfese, who made this tap for us, and we forked it to our git repository.

Please see the installation instructions here, and let us know if there are any problems.

26

If suma is working on your mac, consider locking the version of mesa for now with this command:

brew pin mesa

Once this mesa issue is resolved, we will post about that, and then use this command to allow an update.

brew unpin mesa

Thanks to @pmolfese for this suggestion.