64bit libvisa.so etc - under consideration?

[AKHuettel]

Hi,

I'm curious, is there any chance the driver library stacks (e.g., libvisa.so and related) will become available as a 64bit version in the foreseeable future?

• Running a 32bit kernel is not really an option anymore, since about every measurement PC here has more than 4G memory.
• Running a full 32bit distribution makes not much technical sense since it artificially restricts your data evaluation capabilities.

It is technically possible to add 32bit compatibility libraries to a 64bit installation, true. However this gets messy quickly in many ways:

• The measurement program itself, linked to e.g. libvisa.so, has to be 32bit with corresponding restrictions.
• More relevant though is, every library that the measurement program links to needs to be 32bit. This means you end up installing and keeping in memory additional 32bit copies of e.g. a desktop environment (if your program uses graphics libraries, ie. libQtCore.so, libQtGUI.so, libkdecore.so, ...), installing a second copy of a programming language in 32bit (if your program uses language bindings, i.e. libperl.so, libpython.so) and making sure the build system picks up the correct copy, ...

TIA, best,

Andreas

[irwan]

This question is hard to answer. A lot of us are lowly engineers, and not quite sure what we can say about our internal projects, current and upcoming. All I can say I think is that Linux is becoming more important to NI. Windows is still the most important though. Linux project's priority still needs to be weighed against other things. I think 64bit linux support will come, but not sure whether it's foreseeable.

The engineers in NI totally understand the pain, since we are having to deal with those ourselves. But we can't avoid work prioritization depending on our business needs.

Sorry for saying nothing. I just don't want you to think we're ignoring you. You've been very helpful in this forum. Thanks man!

[rtamblin]

Hello Andreas,

We don't have a committed schedule for NI-VISA to support 64-bit user-mode in Linux yet.  How soon would you need the support?  It's possible we could get you an early build of NI-VISA that includes this support sometime in the Fall.  Would you be open to trying a prerelease version of NI-VISA to start with?  What Linux distro are you using?

Best regards,

Ryan

[AKHuettel]

Hello Ryan,

I'm using Gentoo Linux, so I'm the odd man out... but in any case I would be happy to help testing prerelease versions and giving feedback. Figuring out possible differences between us and SuSE / Fedora is perfectly doable for me. I am also (in my free time) one of the Gentoo Linux developers with full commit privileges for the distribution.

We do not (at work) have any specific schedule for the 64bit drivers- the background of my question is more that our whole measurement infrastructure is slowly moving towards Linux, and while we've been pretty happy with (NI hardware and) LinuxGPIB for a while, now we could well use the NI DAQ drivers.

Please feel free to contact me if there is something I can test, even if it is some prerelease / alpha / beta.

Best,

Andreas

[AKHuettel]

Ping - any news here?

[ozwin]

Hi,

I would also be interested in this, as all our systems are being migrated to Linux, on a Debian based distro.

So any news would be welcome

Thanks !

Just found this : http://pkgs.org/download/libvisa0. Seems that the visa library is already 64 bit compliant.

Related post : https://decibel.ni.com/content/message/47488

[asoedjit]

Hello Andreas,

Apologies for the delay, we were re-evaluating our priorities to see when we can realistically add 64-bit NI-VISA libraries support on Linux.

The quick answer is we can probably get something put together by mid-2014, but we can't promise anything as our resources are already fully booked. From my understanding, you don't have a deadline for this 64-bit NI-VISA libraries support on Linux, is this correct? If so, I think this plan should suffice for now.

Thanks again for all your input to make NI products better on Linux!

[AKHuettel]

Exactly- I have no deadline, I'm willing to test but have these days only limited means and manpower to do so... Thanks for the feedback!

[weatherhead99]

Can I also add a bump to this? Pretty much all our lab computers here are 64-bit linux, and we have to do awful things with chroots/VMs on the machines where we need VISA. It's really annoying - I remember first using a 64-bit OS circa 2004 I believe!

[mtillerson]

Hello all,

We are planning on having a beta quality NI-VISA release with 64-bit Linux support available in the next couple of weeks. This would be a pre-release version that you could use and test. We are still working on the roadmap for when support would be officially released.

I'll update the forum when the prerelease version is available.