Upgrading from LV 5.1 to 8.6 on Big Endian processor

[gen7]

We have legacy systems running LabVIEW 5.1 on Solaris 2.6 that need to be upgraded.  Currently, National Instruments has dropped all support for Solaris in LabVIEW.  We have a VME embedded system we communicate with using network byte order (Big Endian) over TCP/IP.  The LabVIEW GUIs create data/command streams for the embedded system, and receive the data/status back over TCP/IP all in network byte order.  In order to avoid Big/Little endian issues, we need to upgrade to a Big Endian processor for the control system running LabVIEW, and port the old 5.1 LabVIEW VIs to 8.6.  The upgrade path identified is a rackmount G5 PowerPC processor running OS/X operating system, with LabVIEW 8.6.  I assume that LabVIEW will byte swap on a Little Endian (Intel x86) machine, and the effort required to make each and every packet properly byte swapped for the embedded system is formidable.  Is there any known inherent problems in performing an upgrade from Solaris LabVIEW 5.1 to PowerPC OS/X LabVIEW 8.6?  LabVIEW 8.6 can import the 5.1 VIs, correct?

[TCPlomp]

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gen7 wrote:
LabVIEW 8.6 can import the 5.1 VIs, correct?

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I think this is your first issue, if I'm correct LabVIEW 8.6 can only read 6.0 and up.

In typeadapting VI (unflatten from string) you can set the endianess of the data so you should have no issues there.

Ton

Message Edited by TonP on 08-29-2008 09:39 PM

Message Edited by TonP on 08-29-2008 09:40 PM

[altenbach]

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gen7 wrote:
I assume that LabVIEW will byte swap on a Little Endian (Intel x86) machine, and the effort required to make each and every packet properly byte swapped for the embedded system is formidable.

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LabVIEW is big-endian on all platforms (evem x86) so you should not have any problems here.

[gen7]

Thanks for the replies.  We have loaded a demo version of 8.x onto a Windows laptop, and it read our VIs in, but there were the equivalent of linker warnings/errors that were still present.  We have on the order of 300K nodes and dozens of GUIs in this software, and most of the data is packetized telemetry type of data.  The VIs were written with a wide variety of methods for extracting and building the packets to/from the embedded system.  I would be extremely surprised if our GUIs running in LV an x86 processor would process the data correctly both ways.  On a previous project, we converted 680x0 C code to run on a PC with Windows XP.  It was near a nightmare to ensure every single byte was correct going both ways!!

[altenbach]

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gen7 wrote:
I would be extremely surprised if our GUIs running in LV an x86 processor would process the data correctly both ways.

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Well, be extremely surprised, but LabVIEW is big-endian on windows, probably exactly for compatibility reason such as this: 🙂

See for example this link.