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LabVIEW
Why isn't Ni-MAX installed anymore when installing NI-VISA, NI-488.2, or LabVIEW runtimes?
@RTSLVU wrote:
There are plenty of other ways to reduce the installer package. For instance why are we REQUIERD to install several levels of PXI support on every computer we deploy a LabVIEW executable to when we do not have one single PXI device in our company?
That's because the naming of the component is a bit ambigous. For a large part it contains all the NI PAL (Platform Abstraction Layer) implementation. This includes everything to abstract PCI and other hardware resources in your computer across any NI supported OS. PXI being for a large part simply a different physical form factor of PCI is very much using the exact same infrastructure. Even if your computer does not contain a single PCI (or PCI Express) slot anymore, all the system component interconnects are still very much based on PCI technology. Your graphic chip is almost always connected to the CPU through PCI Express, and so is your SATA interface, network controllers, your many USB ports! And the new NVMe interface to connect high speed SSD is technically simply PCI Express too.
It could be slimmed down a bit by removing PXI specific resources and documentations from it but that's a lot of work and testing and will result in yet another sub package to manage.
Basically any NI software that accesses any hardware in your computer in some way directly and not just using standard OS functions (NI-VISA serial theoretically) will require the NI-PAL software to be installed and that means basically the PXI Services software package.
