NIDAQmxbase Compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6

[_Chris]

This thread has more info and potential solution about DAQmx Base install on 10.6

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[JoeFriedchicken]

Hi fellow Mac users 🙂

I would like to caution users that DAQmx Base 3.3.0 on OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is fragile. The executive summary is:

Your devices will work, but you will see errors in certain situations. PCIe devices appear to function normally, but USB devices will give errors when used repeatedly. DAQmx Base may support Snow Leopard at some point in the future, but until we can fix the problems, we cannot give any statements of confidence for your applications if you use it now.

Now, for those interested in the details (I imagine that Scott would be among them), here they are...

The problem lies somewhere in the VISA stack: there are changes between 10.5 and 10.6 that affect VISA's USB communication. If you put a DAQmx Base example in a while loop, eventually the device will stop responding. Wait a few seconds, and it will start listening again.

This was not always the case for OS X 10.6. Before Snow Leopard released, I ran the autotest suite for DAQmx Base 3.3.0 on two pre-release versions of the OS. The kinds of devices supported and the functionality of their support changed between those two versions and the final release version. At first, PCIe devices weren't recognized, but USB devices were. Next, both kinds of devices were recognized and fully functional. Finally, PCIe devices were fine, but USB devices are finicky.

There is Corrective Action Request (CAR) for VISA. When they resolve the problem, we can revisit DAQmx Base support on Snow Leopard. The CAR number is 188434.

[Iandol]

Hi, the last post here was almost a year ago and no update to 3.3.0 is available; will we ever get support for OS X 10.6?

[sth]

I think the official response is "real soon now" but NI can more fully state that.  There are some problems in that fixing the bugs means dropping support for PPC Macs using OS 10.5.  Unfortunately this leaves them stuck with a buggy implementation.  Really an awkward (or some might say unethical) situation for PPC users.

[JoeFriedchicken]

Announcing support for OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) available immediately for download 🙂

NI-DAQmx Base 3.4 for Mac OS X

• http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/id/2127/lang/en

[Iandol]

Hi Joe, thanks for this update! I had a question that wasn't covered in the readme.rtf: Do you support 64bit kernel? I know 3.3 kexts would fail to load on 64bit kernel boots because they were 32bit but didn't see any information about this in the notes of 3.4.

Snow leopard defaults to 32bit kernel, but there are some potential performance (and security IIRC?) advantages of running the kernel itself 64bit (kernel address space flexibility).

Also a small FYI, the install notes on the 3.4 page still reference the 3.3 files 🙂

Thanks

[TrevorChristman]

..

[JoeFriedchicken]

DAQmx Base only supports the 32-bit Mach kernel and 32-bit user-mode programming. The driver sits on top of NI-VISA to perform device I/O and control, and since NI-VISA only supports 32-bit programming on OS X, so must DAQmx Base. The DAQmx Base readme has a note about how to compile the C examples on OS X 10.6 since even a 32-bit installation of OS X still builds for the processor (and not the OS), which results in a stream of gcc/ld errors.

I've notified the driver group about the 3.3/3.4 mix-up and the page should be updated relatively soon. Sharp eyes -- it's good to see folks reading the documentation 😉

[Iandol]

Thanks Joe, so a question then is if I can remove the startup item that is causing abort trap crashes (not fatal, machine still boots) on startup:

Aug 8 18:59:26 Hobbes com.apple.SystemStarter[32]: /Library/StartupItems/nipal/nipal: line 44: 124 Abort trap $enumerateDevices "$INF" Aug 8 18:59:26 Hobbes com.apple.ReportCrash.Root[125]: 2010-08-08 18:59:26.617 ReportCrash[125:2903] Saved crash report for enumerateDevices[124] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/enumerateDevices_2010-08-08-185926_localhost.crash Aug 8 18:59:26 Hobbes com.apple.kextd[10]: Can't load /System/Library/Extensions/NiViPciK.kext - no code for running kernel's architecture. Aug 8 18:59:26 Hobbes com.apple.kextd[10]: Failed to load /System/Library/Extensions/NiViPciK.kext - (libkern/kext) requested architecture/executable not found. Aug 8 18:59:26 Hobbes com.apple.SystemStarter[32]: /System/Library/Extensions/NiViPciK.kext failed to load - (libkern/kext) requested architecture/executable not found; check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8).

64bit kernel is useful when I'm running other applications such as Adobe suite. I'd want to be able to boot into 32bit whenever I needed NI-DAQmx base, but not be forced to always run 32bit. What exactly do nipal and NiViPcik do, if I only care about C support for a USB-6009 do they matter?

[JoeFriedchicken]

When do you get those console messages -- when you boot 64K, 32K, or both?