PCI express device on Windows Virtual Machine on Macintosh?

[WM_John_Weeks]

Wow, that's a long title...

I was wondering if anyone has tried using a PCI-e DAQ device installed in a (recent) Mac Pro (which has PCI express slots), running under Windows in either Parallels or VMWare Fusion.

I have customers who hate Windows, love their Macs, can't use NI-DAQmx Base, and might just barely tolerate Windows running as a virtual machine on their Macintosh.

[Abram_R · Accepted solution]

Hello John,

Unfortunatly, a Windows virtual machine does not fully emulate the low level software needed to run DAQmx on a Macintosh.

What your customers can do, however, is run Boot Camp to install Windows on their machine, and then they will be able to use DAQmx.

http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp/ 

-Abram 

[WM_John_Weeks]

Thanks, Abram. That seemed likely but I thought it was worth a question. I don't have a PCIe device to try it with.

Boot Camp is already a pretty good solution, but it would be even better if a virtual machine could do it.

[stilly32]

Just to clarify - Virtual machines support all the low level OS featuers needed for DAQmx (it is just Windows) but none of the current virtual machine solutions currently support PCI/PCIe devices... so you could use DAQmx but not with HW. VMWare does support USB though and while the throughput isn't as good as a normal host you can use USB DAQ with DAQmx.

Cheers, 

Andrew S

[WM_John_Weeks]

Thanks, Andrew. That's very helpful.

[JoeFriedchicken]

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WM John Weeks wrote:

I have customers who hate Windows, love their Macs, can't use NI-DAQmx Base, and might just barely tolerate Windows running as a virtual machine on their Macintosh.

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Why isn't DAQmx Base an option for your customers?

[WM_John_Weeks]

Joe-

Thanks for asking, Joe.

NI-DAQmx Base just isn't robust enough for my application. I confess it's been a while since I looked at it so my memory of the details is fading.

It's a plug-in module for our main product, Igor Pro, that adds data acquisition capability using NI DAQ devices.

1) Because I don't know anything about how customers will apply it, I use properties in NI-DAQmx quite a bit to get needed information. I also use properties for setting up certain more-sophisticated tasks. The last time I looked, NI-DAQmx Base doesn't have support for properties.

2) The presence of the Labview engine in my process causes certain sorts of problems, including the presence of Labviews main window in our window list. I had to introduce some special code to make sure we didn't interpret the Labview window as one of ours when we walk the window list. It's clear that NI-DAQmx Base was thought of as a basis for stand-alone applications.

3) Incomplete support. Here I can't remember the details, but some supported devices lacked support for certain features. I think that included counting modes, perhaps? and trigger modes?

4)  Upgrade difficulties- NI-DAQmx Base wasn't backward compatible. Code built against one version refused to run with a later update. The later update wouldn't run with all the versions of the OS we run on, so I was looking at a situation where I would have to make multiple versions available and then handle the support issues when people used the wrong combination of plug-in version, driver version and OS version. This was true going from 1.4->1.5 and 1.5->2.0.

5) A lot of feature support depends on creating tasks using mxbaseconfig. I couldn't get any information about what the tasks do, so I couldn't be sure I wasn't going to do something that would crash. Someone who writes code specifically for such a task can take the responsibility to make the code satisfy the task, but in my case the customer would have created the task, and my code would just have to believe them about what it does. I can assure you that would generate tech support calls.

I hope that's helpful.

I would port my plug-in to Macintosh very quickly if NI-DAQmx were made available for OS X.

Message Edited by WM John Weeks on 05-08-2009 02:48 PM