NI488.2 for 64 bit systems - Red Hat only?

[j2m]

We are using NI488.2 2.9 on a server running Scientific Linux 6. In the process of installing the drivers, we hit the "4096M" ram limit and ended up downgrading the machine from 8 GB to 2 GB.

Recently, I found this discussion thread :

http://208.74.204.114/t5/Instrument-Control-GPIB-Serial/ni4882-driver-error-in-linux/td-p/847147

in which someone suggested that going 64 bits would solve the problem.

> On 32-bit systems NI drivers only support 4GB of addressable memory, so you will need to use the mem=4096M parameter.  If you need all 8 GB of RAM and you currently only use NI-488.2 and NI-VISA then > I recommend installing 64-bit Linux and using the 64-bit drivers:

> http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/id/1000/lang/en

> http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/id/1074/lang/en

>

> Shawn Bohrer

> National Instruments

Is this a valid approach for SL 6 ?

According to the NI.488.2 datasheet for v. 2.9, the system requirements are listed as :

openSUSE 11.2 32 bit

openSUSE 11.3 32 bit

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Scientific Linux 5 32 bit

Scientific Linux 6

Why is "32 bits" specified for SL 5, but not for SL 6? Does it somehow imply that this driver can be used with SL 6 in the 64 bit mode? (seems unlikely to me…)

Otherwise, is there any chance that a 64 bit version compatible with SL 6 might appear in a near future?

Thanks for helping.

[irwan]

I believe that it'll work. Make sure you have the latest nikal. You can download the latest one here:

http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/id/2372/lang/en

It does support x64. SciLinux is a derivative of RHEL, so it should work.

Everything on top of nikal, if it does support the 64bit binary kernel then they should just work.

Let us know if you have problems

[mhoogend]

NI-488.2 2.9 does include the 64-bit RPM files in the distribution.  So although it doesn't advertise x64 on the download page it does have it.  You should be able to install it on x64 SL 6.

http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/id/2636/lang/en

[JasonSmith]

As 64-bit operating systems have become more prevalent, we have begun assuming in our NI-488.2 documentation that both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels are supported, unless otherwise specified. This means that it will work with Scientific Linux 6 64-bit.

In your case, you will not need to install a newer version of NI-KAL. The version includes with NI-488.2 is sufficient.

-Jason

[j2m]

Thanks for your encouraging replies.

We will try this on a new machine which we are going to set up soon.

[j2m]

I am coming back to this thread because we have made some progress and successfully installed NI-488.2 v2.9 on our 64-bit machines running SL 6.

GPIB explorer now connects to our GPIB-Enet/100 box and the dialog can be established.

However, we have problems to link our programs to the libgpibapi.so library (part of the NI-488.2 package). We succeed only if we use the -m32 option of gcc. As I understand, this comes from the fact that the version of the library is not 64-bit compatible.

There was actually a post some time ago on the same subject

https://decibel.ni.com/content/groups/linux-users/blog/2011/05/20/ni-4882-for-linux-software-for-the...

but  no answer was posted. In view of the date, it likely corresponded to an earlier version of NI-488.2 (2.5 ?).

Have things changed with v 2.9 or are some libraries still available only for 32-bit?

[JasonSmith]

This is still the case, the NI-488.2 libraries work only in 32-bit applications. The post you referenced indicates that the packages claim to be 64-bit, but only contain 32-bit binaries. In actuality there are two separate packages. The first package is the kernel driver, and is provided for i386 and x86_64. The second package provides utilities and application interfaces, and is i386 only.

In reviewing the documentation for NI-488.2 version 2.9, it appears that the download page has this information, but it is missing from the Readme file. I have filed a report so that in our next Linux release we can be sure to clarify the current application support in the Readme file.

-Jason S.

[j2m]

Thanks a lot. Just for my information, is it unlikely that the "utilities and application interfaces" package may be released for 64-bit systems?

I must admit that I have no idea of whether this simply requires recompiling some amount of code, or rather implies a significant revision.