LabVIEW on Windows 11 ARM inside Parallels on M1 Mac

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Does anyone have any experience running LabVIEW on Parallels on the new M1 Macs?

I need to upgrade my Intel Mac to an M1 and was wondering if there are any gotchas. I already know that I need Windows11 ARM. But will that work ok with LabVIEW and how about the drivers? Will Windows emulation cover all the issues?

[LogMAN]

I don't have any experience with Macs, but there is a topic in the LabVIEW 2021 Beta Forum related to Apple M1 chips: [New Feature] macOS Big Sur Support - NI Community

[hooovahh]

That thread looks promising.

I experimented with Windows 10 ARM by putting it on a Raspberry pi, then trying to run LabVIEW programs.  At the time the x86 emulation built into Windows 10 didn't support several SSE extended CPU instructions, and LabVIEW EXEs wouldn't run.  After rolling back to LabVIEW 2016 I was able to disable those instructions, make a build, and run the EXE.  I didn't attempt to run the IDE because even installing the runtime was difficult with various MSI installers needing to be manually installed. 

[Michael Aivaliotis]

16 hours ago, LogMAN said:

I don't have any experience with Macs, but there is a topic in the LabVIEW 2021 Beta Forum related to Apple M1 chips: [New Feature] macOS Big Sur Support - NI Community

Thanks for that link. However, that post is for running LabVIEW on MacOS natively, not inside of parallels with Windows.

[Neko]

I would love to get this going myself. I've been developing in Parallels on Intel Macs for years. The problem I see currently is drivers for pretty much everything. I use FTDI-based devices and they have some ARM drivers in beta-ish format. But I also use a lot of ARM-based Arduino boards, and there is no support for the Arduino IDE or for recognizing the boards. So sort of stuck for now.

[emcware]

I have been using Parallels on my Mac to develop LabVIEW (for Windows) code for years and have been very happy with it.  I have been trying for some time to get this working with the M1 chip.   I have an Apple M1 Mac mini and more recently, an M1 MacBook Pro.   Installing Windows 11 ARM is straightforward.   LabVIEW does install and I am able to partially open my projects but I have a lot of packages as dependancies and am not able to get VI Package Manager to work.  But more significantly, every time I install NI-Max, it kills Windows and I am no longer able to boot.    I recommend you keep ‘Snapshots’ of your Parallels VMs as you get thinks working.   Hopefully you will have more success than me.  

[hooovahh]

This looks similar to the issue I mentioned earlier with SSE instructions.  The guess at the time was that the translation layer of Windows for ARM for running x86 applications, didn't fully support all the instructions.  This is why in my experimentation with LabVIEW on Windows 10 on a Pi, I had to go with LabVIEW 2016.  With 2016  there is settings in the application builder that can turn SSE optimizations off.  Since VIPM is built using LabVIEW using those SSE instructions, it can't run.  MAX corrupting Windows is a new one.

[Jacob7]

On 1/6/2022 at 12:58 PM, emcware said:

I have been using Parallels on my Mac to develop LabVIEW (for Windows) code for years and have been very happy with it.  I have been trying for some time to get this working with the M1 chip.   I have an Apple M1 Mac mini and more recently, an M1 MacBook Pro.   Installing Windows 11 ARM is straightforward.   LabVIEW does install and I am able to partially open my projects but I have a lot of packages as dependancies and am not able to get VI Package Manager to work.  But more significantly, every time I install NI-Max, it kills Windows and I am no longer able to boot.    I recommend you keep ‘Snapshots’ of your Parallels VMs as you get thinks working.   Hopefully you will have more success than me.  

 

On 1/6/2022 at 12:58 PM, emcware said:

I have been using Parallels on my Mac to develop LabVIEW (for Windows) code for years and have been very happy with it.  I have been trying for some time to get this working with the M1 chip.   I have an Apple M1 Mac mini and more recently, an M1 MacBook Pro.   Installing Windows 11 ARM is straightforward.   LabVIEW does install and I am able to partially open my projects but I have a lot of packages as dependancies and am not able to get VI Package Manager to work.  But more significantly, every time I install NI-Max, it kills Windows and I am no longer able to boot.    I recommend you keep ‘Snapshots’ of your Parallels VMs as you get thinks working.   Hopefully you will have more success than me.  

Did you figure out how to get it installed? I'm currently experiencing the same problems. I was able to install base LV with the math toolbox but nothing else. Bricks my machine every other time. I've gone through ~25 Windows 11 snapshots trying to get at least some basic add-ons installed like DAQ, but haven't had any luck  

[X___]

This is why I switched to a ThinkPad in Dec. 2020. No regrets whatsoever.

[Justin Goeres]

I took a crack at this when I got my M1 back in December and got nowhere, but now I have progress.

TL;DR it doesn't work yet, though.

I've been working to get Windows x86 to stand up on UTM (which I gather is really just a fancy frontend to QEMU). I'll write things up better when I have something real to show for it, but so far:

• I can't get it to install Win11 x86, because it seems to insist there's an architecture mismatch. I suspect this is an error on my end, since it was the first thing I tried and I may have misunderstood some of the config.
• I did get it to boot and install Win10 x86. However, when I rebooted after install, Windows gets angry about not being able to find the "Desktop" for the user, and kind of loses its mind. This is also possible my error somewhere, but I haven't gone back to figure it out.

I'm not super optimistic about this, since ultimately it'll be running emulated, not under virtualization. So speed is likely to be not great. But it's at least a potential way forward and if somebody else wants to give it a shot, UTM may be an option.

[Rafael R]

On 1/27/2022 at 12:20 AM, Justin Goeres said:

I took a crack at this when I got my M1 back in December and got nowhere, but now I have progress.

TL;DR it doesn't work yet, though.

I've been working to get Windows x86 to stand up on UTM (which I gather is really just a fancy frontend to QEMU). I'll write things up better when I have something real to show for it, but so far:

• I can't get it to install Win11 x86, because it seems to insist there's an architecture mismatch. I suspect this is an error on my end, since it was the first thing I tried and I may have misunderstood some of the config.
• I did get it to boot and install Win10 x86. However, when I rebooted after install, Windows gets angry about not being able to find the "Desktop" for the user, and kind of loses its mind. This is also possible my error somewhere, but I haven't gone back to figure it out.

I'm not super optimistic about this, since ultimately it'll be running emulated, not under virtualization. So speed is likely to be not great. But it's at least a potential way forward and if somebody else wants to give it a shot, UTM may be an option.

 

Do you managed to get this working? I'm not looking at LabView but 488.2 drivers, that are not available for windows arm, just x86,  I was thinking in running QEMU/UTM to get x86 windows and use usb passthrough to get NI software in this ""VM"". 

Thanks