NI-KAL in SuSE Linux 11.4

[irwan]

Hi COPeter, I'm sorry I'm not involved in DAQmxBase. That's a different group, and JoeFriedchicken can help you better with that. I'm assuming that you're talking about

https://decibel.ni.com/content/thread/5332?start=30&tstart=0

but according to that thread, Joe has been unable to reproduce. So if you have additional information, please provide it in that thread.

Guys, I can assure you that our management is taking Linux seriously. It might not seem like that on the outside, but we are aware of the Linux market demand. The problem is that it is hard to measure how big of market it is to justify the investment. In terms of Linux, its support is doubly difficult due to its distribution model and the users profile. And as you understand, it is desirable to invest appropriately depending on the market for a particular domain. Our biggest desktop platform is still Windows, so that's where most of our investment and resources goes. So it has been a struggle on the Linux side. Obviously, I can't say much in this forum. Afterall, I'm just an engineer. But I do symphatize with your difficulties. Sorry about that.

[irwan]

Oh, and I keep forgetting to say that nipal fails to load on my default 11.4 installation, unless I use the kernel parameter "vmalloc=256M" during boot.

[anshuljain]

irwan,

Thanks for the patch for openSUSE 11.4. I was able to use this patch and successfully install NI-KAL & NI-VISA on Ubuntu Lucid using the 2.6.38 kernel through the kernel-ppa However, I did not have to pass "vmalloc=256M" at the grub line. Attached is a screenshot of visaconf and the loaded modules on my Ubuntu install. Attached is the modified nikal.c file with your patch. I hope this works for others in the community.

-Anshul

[lup]

anshuljain, I tried your appending nikal.c, it tells me :can't find linux/autoconf.h

I changed this section:

#ifdef nNIKAL200_kUsesGeneratedDir

   #include <generated/autoconf.h>

#else

   #include <linux/autoconf.h>

#endif

to :

#ifdef nNIKAL200_kUsesGeneratedDir

   #include <generated/autoconf.h>

#else

   #include <generated/autoconf.h>

#endif

then updateNIdriver is ok, I don't know which step can generate linux/autoconf.h.

[anshuljain]

The location of these files has changed from kernels 2.6.35+. After running make cloneconfig && make modules_prepare...these files are in the ~include/generated folder. Just copy the contents of this folder (all of the *.h files) to ~include/linux folder and re-run the installer script. It should work fine now.

[lup]

anshuljain, Thank you.

[ninevoltz]

Thanks for the patch, irwan! I have to say Linux support from NI has been above average. All you complainers need to give them a break. I've got DAQmx running well on Fedora 15 with kernel 2.6.38.6-27.fc15.i686. Easy.

[irwan]

Thank you for the kind words ninevoltz. Our team here really appreciates it.

I do know that our Linux support could be a lot better. Thank you for bearing with us.

[Prof. Tom]

I don't see any mention in this thread of udev problems, so perhaps no one has tried USB devices.  All the SYSFS keywords in the udev rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/ni* files need to be changed to ATTR to get the hotpluging working for usb devices.  This is also true on SUSE 11.2 with the latest updates.

[irwan]

NI-KAL doesn't support USB. All USB symbols in the kernel was marked as EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL sometime back, thus we can no longer call them. I'm also not aware of NI installing anything under udev rules.