LabVIEW
LabVIEW Real-Time application on standard desktop PC?
You need a Realtime OS to run a built LabVIEW Realtime application. It will NOT work on your standard Windows system.
The first NI RT hardware platforms used Pharlap ETS. This is a RT OS that has Windows 32-bit Portable Executable compatible binary files. The advantage there was that you could actually use many DLLs originally developed for Windows directly on it. However this OS provided a limited set of APIs as of Windows NT 3.5/4.0 kernel and DLL's compiled for later versions of Windows and with later compilers than Visual C 6.0 did usually not work anymore without some custom compiling.
As Intel CPUs were at that time hard pressured to work reliable in low power embedded systems, NI eventually moved to PowerPC CPUs for their next RT target platform. Since Pharlap ETS was very much Intel x86 specific, there was no way to cross compile it for the PowerPC platform and NI had to look for a different OS. They choose VxWorks for this platform.
NI still supported and maintained the Pharlap ETS platform for their more performant PXI controllers, where embedded low power operation was not that much of a concern.
But around 2008 Interval Zero, the new owner of Pharlap ETS eventually announced that they were going to discontinue Pharlap ETS in favor of their own RT OS platform RTX (nowadays RTX64). So NI had to search for a new platform for their x86/x64 based PXI controllers. And they ended up with Linux with some specific real-time enabled patches.
For the Pharlap ETS system, you could buy a runtime license that allowed you to install it on a standard PC. Although that standard PC you had to take with a pinch of salt. Pharlap ETS only had a limited set of hardware drivers for network cards, chipsets, video cards and such. So you had to make sure your PC was using one of them, otherwise it simply did not recognize that hardware. Especially for network cards this posed a problem as it did not like many of the low cost Ethernet controller chips that were used in PCs or were fully integrated in the motherboard chipset.
Around 2013 when Interval Zero completely stopped selling Pharlap ETS to anyone, including its long standing customers like NI, NI released the NI Linux RT platform. Technically it is possible to install NI Linux RT on a normal PC. Legally however it is not. NI never really came around to offer a deployment license for such an installation. And yes, since it is Linux you don't really need a license for the Linux OS kernel that is part of the NI Linux RT system. However that kernel is simply a somewhat customized Linux kernel and if you just want that on a PC you are much better served with one of the more mainstream Linux distributions.
However, the NI Linux RT platform consists of a lot of other components that are fully NI owned proprietary technology. First and the most important is the LabVIEW runtime engine itself, which is a special build for the RT platform. But LabVIEW without some hardware IO is generally pretty underwhelming, so you need other NI components such as NI-VISA, NI-DAQmx, NI-XNET, NI-This and NI-That drivers and the underlying OS Hardware Abstraction Framework for all the NI drivers, called NIPAL. These do not fall under the Linux GNU license and accordingly you need a proper license from NI to install them on such a system. And they are not just a simple copy of the standard NI drivers for the Linux desktop OS but specifically created for the NI Linux RT platform.
Unfortunately, NI still couldn't decide to provide such a deployment license as of today. And an according simple installer and installation instructions. It can be done with tinkering and persistence but it is legally a non-solution.
And in case you want to go hunting for the old NI Pharlap ETS deployment license instead, you should reconsider your plans. NI discontinued NI Pharlap ETS fully and completely with the LabVIEW 2022 platform. https://www.ni.com/content/dam/web/pdfs/phar-lap-rt-eol-roadmap.pdf
This link you mention: License Required to Install LabVIEW Real-Time (RT) Engine to a RT System refers to installing NI Linux RT on a NI PXI controller.
It does not apply to installing NI Linux RT on your own hardware. And as explained, you can download the sources of NI Linux RT and compile it to whatever platform you like and install it on there. It is after all simply Linux with some custom patches and build configurations. But that is simply a Linux kernel and does not contain any NI specific software. Accordingly you can not use it for LabVIEW Realtime. For that you need the real-time capable LabVIEW runtime engine and quite a bit of other NI software, which is not GNU licensed, but with an NI proprietary license.
I’m not working for Ni and have no official knowledge nor any authority to speak for them but here are my thoughts:
1) You likely do not want this. It puts your product at the whim of NI’s legal department. In any case your company would have to negotiate a license deal with NI. NI’s eagerness for such a deal is about non-existent, unless you would talk about significant (and I’m talking 6 to 7 digits) yearly license fees for them.
2) I have no idea what you mean with that. Change what? Where? How and by whom?
3) That’s an option but likely would be even more expensive in the long run than option 1)
4) I’m sure I would not be able to get the engineering documents, schemata and software sources for your companies devices. It’s the nature of most modern businesses that everybody wants to use Open Source, preferably as in Free Beer too, but keeps their own developments usually proprietary IP,
Another technical point. Your device may be using an ARM Cortex M CPU. LabVIEW realtime for their ARM platform (Zync 7010/7020) specifically requires a Cortex A architecture. This is because the Cortex M and others are optimized for low power embedded devices and lacks certain features such a memory. virtualization and floating point support that LabVIEW relies on.
