Multifunction DAQ
NIDAQmxbase Compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6
landol,
When you state "64bit kernel is useful when I'm running other applications such as Adobe suite." that just means that you need the Adobe suite to run 64 bit which is perfectly possible using a 32 bit kernel. There is not a lot of reason to need a 64 bit kernel at the moment. 64 bit drivers for hardware are the necessary thing and there are not a lot of 3rd party 64 bit drivers at the moment. Maybe Joe can tell us when NI will be issuing 64 bit drivers? My guess is about a year after Mac OS X 10.7 Feral Cat comes out which does not have a 32 bit mode.
For information on running Adobe with 32 bit kernel see this post.
No, I do mean that running especially 32bit apps on a 64bit kernel affords from a few up to 30% performance boost due to the TLB:
[quote]Snow Leopard will deliver both a 64-bit kernel and a full set of 64-bit bundled apps, erasing the entire TLB flush issue because the new kernel won't have to share any address space, even when running 32-bit apps (below right).[/quote] http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/04/road_to_snow_leopard_twice_the_ram_half_the_price_64_b...
See http://macperformanceguide.com/SnowLeopard-64bit.html -- an up to 30% improvement using 32bit Photoshop CS4, that is like getting a significant hardware upgrade for free!
Yeah, I've seen those claims. But look at the actual benchmarks. If you do the math on all the graphs, the difference between SL-32 and SL-64 is between 3% and 6% with one graph out of the 7 showing a 14%. At the end they seem to throw out the 30% number but I think that is the difference between L and SL.
Have you benchmarked an actual 30% gain? That seems to be one of those numbers for a benchmark that is specifically engineered to give a high value rather than real world experience.
Other than that, you will just have to disable the NIDAQ drivers and startup before booting into 64 bit mode.
Ah, sorry for misrepresenting the 30% value. Personally I see about 5% improvement in Matlab, and a bit more in Lightroom 3 (seconds *do* matter when you just want to get something done quickly!). anyway this is getting OT, so I'll stop there 
I agree seconds do matter. I gather you really really want to run in 64 bit mode. Also having looked at device driver kernel programming I don't believe that there is any security differences between 32 and 64 bit kernels. Once a bad guy is in the kernel it is all over and there are no "memory areas" that can be isolated unlike user space.
The easiest thing is to ignore the NIPAL crash when booting into 64 bit mode. It is unnecessary unless you are using VISA for GPIB, Serial or DAQ operations. Since you can't do that in 64 bit mode it doesn't matter.
The enumerate devices routine fails since the KEXT didn't load. So it expects a KEXT that isn't there and then crashes. Let it crash since it is non-functional anyway.
I think the best is to ask Joe F. here to work on having a 64 bit kernel ready when Apple has a 64 bit kernel only system. My guess is release data for 10.7. I would rather have that ready on release date rather than a year later like this release for 10.6. Since there are developer versions out there, I would hope that NI starts working on it soon! The fact that we are now getting a 10.6 compatible release a year after 10.6 was released is not good.
<Sarcasm ignored mode>
No, it won't work. If you need single analog read then you need the nipal and the VISA kext drivers. See I am not sure what your basic needs are. As far as I can tell the best way to get the combination you want is to boot into 64 bit kernel and run your Adobe applications. Ignore the nipal crash. Do not remove nipal. When you want to do labview data acq you will have to reboot into 32 bit mode. If you need 64 bit kernel for speed in using Adobe while doing hardware I/O using NI products simultaneously then you are out of luck.
</Sarcasm ignored mode>
There is no 64 bit kext from NI for Mac OS X. Thus you cannot do any NI hardware operations when your kernel is in 64 bit mode. You have a trade off between running Adobe with a 64 bit kernel and the time to reboot to use the NI hardware. The nipal crash is expected and irrelevant in 64 bit mode.
Have you bothered to add the need for 64 bit OS X drivers to the NI product suggestion page. This would be a most useful action.
If other vendors have better products then go ahead and use them. Pick the best hardware/software configuration for your needs.
