LabVIEW 2021 Public Beta
[New Feature] macOS Big Sur Support
NIDAQmxBase started out as a good idea. Having the hardware interface as simple as possible and then writing an API in LV. HOWEVER the way it was implemented means that the code has conditionals for every board supported. This means that code is loaded for all possible boards even if they don't exist on the system.
Further adding a board means edition and adding a case to each of about 1500 VIs that check the board type.
It was a design choice that got the job done but did not allow for future maintenance and extension. I think a very different design pattern (Actor? GOOP?) might have made the the software much more successful.
The other problem is that LV does not produce particularly efficient and compact code. This has never been addressed and in most cases (PID kit etc. and drivers) the default is to go back to C or C++ to get the requisite performance. If instead the insistance was to make LV a first class development system by forcing "dog fooding", LV would be in a different space today.
Similar to to my post just above, when calling Functions on the Block Diagram, you can see the Array, Cluster, and Numeric items not quite loading; no crash thought. Here, quitting and restarting LabVIEW seems to have restored things.
Well, so far I have not encountered such misbehavior...yet? In fact things run rather well with my LV21.0b11 (do you have a different version LV21.01b11?). Actually I am able to wirework in a rather productive smooth way on my MBPro M1 running Big Sur 11.4. I assume you have reported your problem as a big officially.
Happy wireworks
Urs
@PHacke wrote:
Then about a week into things, I right click on a Block Diagram that I am working on to bring up the Functions Pallet and choose Structures (or any function) in the pallet doing absolutely nothing fancy, and LabVIEW quits without warning, without error message.
Posting the LabVIEW crash report in either ~/Library/Logs/Diagnostic Reports or in the system location /Library/Logs/Diagnostic Reports might be helpful. There was one setting for issues with running on the M1 processor that may not have been incorporated into this beta.
Likewise, to resolve LabVIEW crashing in a similar fashion, you will need to enter the following (similar) commands via a terminal:
defaults write "com.ni.labview" NSGraphicsContextAllowOverRestore -bool YES
defaults write "com.ni.labview" NSViewAllowsRootLayerBacking -bool NOLet us all know if this works.
I got NIDAQmxBase running on Big Sur again after the update to 11.4. I had to reauthorize the kext (kernel extensions again) but the GUI was not triggered and would not let me do it. So reboot into recovery mode (command-R until the apple icon appears at boot)
Then once Recovery comes up, go to Utilities -> Terminal and enter the following
spctl kext-consent add SKTKK2QZ74This is "System Policy Security Control". This adds the developer key for NI to the kexts that are allowed to load. I had several others to install as well (CISCO, VMWare, Intel and hp), but I believe that is the one for NI. You can use "spctl kext-consent list" to list those that are approved.
For the bold and not afraid to trash their systems you can look at the data base during normal running. Just inspecting the database should be ok.
sudo sqlite3 /var/db/SystemPolicyConfiguration/KextPolicyWill let you dump the database for various tables including kext_policy_mdm which is where I found that name. As my high school biology teach said about mushroom picking. Have fun but be careful.
What *might* be helpful is a couple of things.
In ~/Documents/LabVIEW Data/lvfailurelog/ are files of the sort "lvlog2021-03-29-15-16-16.txt" These can sometimes show what LV was doing when it failed.
The other location is if there is a true crash of LabVIEW there will be a file ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/LabVIEW*.crash" or a similar file ending in .crash in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports, I don't recall why some go in each. These are fairly rare these days, thankfully, and you should get a system error message about LabVIEW unexpectedly quitting and if you want to send the error report to Apple.
