LabVIEW 21 on the new Mac M1

[jimlandowski]

I am trying to install LabVIEW 21 onto my new iMac but these are the stated requirements:

System Requirements

LabVIEW 2021 for macOS has the following requirements:

macOS	Run-Time Engine	Development Environment
Processor	Intel-based processor	Intel-based processor
RAM	256 MB	2 GB
Screen Resolution	1024 x 768 pixels	1024 x 768 pixels
Operating System	macOS 11 (x86_64 only) or 10.15	macOS 11 (x86_64 only) or 10.15

1. The new Mac has their own CPU M1, not Intel.

2. It has macOS 12.

It looks hopeless to use LabVIEW on their new M1 iMacs. Right?

[UliB · Accepted solution]

There's a bug in Rosetta 2 that's affecting LabVIEW.

See this thread for more information:

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-2021-Public-Beta/New-Feature-macOS-Big-Sur-Support/m-p/4144162 

[JNHeyman]

This link is inaccessible.  Can LabView run on Mac computers with the M chip or not?  If not, will be solved soon, or is LabView abandoning the Mac platform?

[rolfk]

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@JNHeyman wrote:

This link is inaccessible.  Can LabView run on Mac computers with the M chip or not?  If not, will be solved soon, or is LabView abandoning the Mac platform?

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Since the Beta has expired, the according forum has been closed. So the post is not readable anymore.

The official news is that it does not work, the unofficial news is that it can be made to work if you only want LabVIEW but no drivers of any sort. Hardware drivers require kernel drivers and Apple choose to not support virtualization through Rosette2 for kernel code, most likely because they wanted to have it running in this decade. 😀

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/LabVIEW-on-Apple-Silicon-M1-and-beyond/td-p/4100430

It still requires tinkering with some MacOS settings for your executable. As to when LabVIEW fully will support Mac M1 hardware my guess is as good as yours. As far as LabVIEW is concerned it is certainly a fairly doable task. They need to fix a few things that have more to do with Mac OS Big Sur than anything else and then recompile everything in a recent xcode version for the ARM. This could proof a little troublesome but the LabVIEW source code being compiled in at least three different compilers currently xcode, gcc and Visual C, should have ironed out most compiler specific throuble. The biggest work is usually to make it adapt to a new MacOS major version.

Another slightly trickier job will be to add and verify the according ARM llvm backend to let it compile the VIs to native M1 assembly code. But that shouldn't be a huge task either, they already use an ARM compiler for the lower cost RIO RT targets they sell and while the M1 will need a different version to fully support the M1 CPUs including their 64-bit operation instead of the 32-bit operation of the RIO ARM targets, it should be mostly isolated from the LabVIEW system through the llvm framework.

What will be more tricky is to add support for for their drivers like NI-DAQmx, NI-4882 etc. Basically anything that access hardware directly rather than through a standard OS interface.