ni4882 driver error in linux

[racer_81]

Hello.

I have a linux box with 8GB ram, and a 2.6.9-67-ELhugemen kernel.

In the kernel boot parameters in /etc/grub.conf, there is the parameter setting of mem=4096M.

With this setting, linux boots and the NI drivers load okay.

If I change the parameter setting to mem=8192M (in order to see all 8GB of ram), the NI drivers

decide that the kernel has changed and they error out.

Has anybody else experienced this?  

Thanks! 

[Shawn B.]

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

[racer_81]

Thanks Shawn.

There's a plan to go to 64 bit, but it's a long road to get there with all the other software.

Meanwhile, we've exhausted the 4GB of ram, and hoped that moving to 8GB would "bridge" us to 64 bit.

Is there a way to reserve memory space for the NI drivers in the lower 4GB of memory, and allow the

rest of the software to use the upper 4GB?

[Shawn B.]

---

racer_81 wrote:

Is there a way to reserve memory space for the NI drivers in the lower 4GB of memory, and allow the

rest of the software to use the upper 4GB?

---

There isn't a way for you as a customer to do this.  Really the drivers need to be modified to ensure that all memory buffers used by the hardware are in the lower 4GB.  One of the problems is that some of those buffers are allocated by the user-mode process and passed to the driver.

---

racer_81 wrote:

There's a plan to go to 64 bit, but it's a long road to get there with all the other software.

---

You didn't mention what distribution you are using, but as long as it is multilib compatible you can run all of your 32-bit user-mode software without a problem.  In fact our current 64-bit releases of NI-488.2 and NI-VISA contain 64-bit kernel drivers but only provide 32-bit user-mode libraries.

Shawn Bohrer

National Instruments

[racer_81]

Thanks, Shawn

We're using CentOS 4.6 here.

[Shawn B.]

CentOS has multilib support so you should be able to run all of your 32-bit apps without a problem.  Of course if you are upgrading to 64-bit I'd recommend switching to CentOS 5.x as well.

Shawn Bohrer

National Instruments