Attempt to use Heritage Card PXI-6511 with CentOS 7

[jlabbe]

Hi Team,

I'm currently trying to use some heritage National Instrument boards (PXI-6511, PXI-65090) over a GeoTest chassis with the couple PXI-8360 and PCIe-8361 as MXI Interface.

As OS, we've chosen CentOS 7 kernel 3.10.

[username@localhost bin]$ uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 3.10.0-693.21.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Mar 7 19:03:37 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

So far, the PXI interface does seem to work (after adding the pci=nommconf option on the kernel grub command line) as the lspci command does show:

[username@localhost bin]$ lspci | grep Nation
08:0f.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: National Instruments PXI-8360
09:0d.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: National Instruments PXI-6509
09:0e.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: National Instruments PXI-6511
09:0f.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: National Instruments PXI-6511

However, the lsdaq command, result of installing nidaqmxbase-15.0.0 and adequate 32-bit libraries, doesn't seem to give any results:

[username@localhost bin]$ lsdaq
--------------------------------
Detecting National Instruments DAQ Devices
Found the following DAQ Devices:
--------------------------------
[username@localhost bin]$

I shall add that I already tried to add the "memmap=4096M" option to the kernel grub command line.

Would somebody be able to confirm these boards are not supported anymore? Any reason why? 

Or maybe point towards a potential tip that I haven't found quite yet?

Thanks a lot for your help,

Jeremie

[andres.vargas]

Hello jlabbe,

Unfortunately neither the PXI-6509, PXI-6511 or PXI-8360 are listed as supported devices on the readme file for NI-DAQmx Base 15.0.0.

I believe these devices are simply not supported yet on Linux.

Best,

Notanae

[jlabbe]

Would you know whether there's any plan to support those boards at any one point, or the technical reason for these not to be supported?

Thanks a lot for your response,

Jeremie

[andres.vargas]

Take this as my personal opinion on the subject. 

Ideally these products should be supported on all platforms, however Linux has a much lower demand than other platforms, and this leads to development time being allocated elsewhere with a higher impact on the customer base.

Although I think the goal is to support them on Linux, I don't think this goal has a defined timeline. I would recomend using Windows to bypass this problem.

Best

[jlabbe]

Any idea about the technical reason for the non-support?

Is it just that the drivers have not been compiled back on CentOS 7? Or is it that the hardware architecture has changed?

Thanks a lot for your help, 

Unfortunately, porting to Windows is not really an option, as the application is for Linux only.

[andres.vargas]

It could be a life cycle policy that prevented this driver update task to be sent to the work queue or that it is not there yet due to prioritization of other taks. The former seems most plausible though.

[jlabbe]

Last update being 2011, I would indeed think that priority has been given to something else.

I'll have a look at either going back to CentOS 5 (EOL though) or switching to Windows.

Thanks for your help,

Jeremie

[andres.vargas]

I am sorry for the inconvenience Jeremy, success.