National instrument GITHUB repo NI/Linux

[Youssef Menjour]

Hi everyone,

Can someone explain to me what this repository is for?

From the NI linux RT source code, can we consider, after hard development work, gateways to, for example, a LabVIEW deployment of RT code on a Jetson nano ?

I would really like to understand what it is, thank you

https://github.com/ni/linux?tab=readme-ov-file

[Antoine Chalons]

Yeah... LabVIEW everywhere was a slogan when LabVIEW RT was released. It was cool at time!

I don't think NI's focus is to make it possible to deploy your LabVIEW code to some cheap hardware that generates no revenue for them...

As for your question about the repo, if I understand correctly, it's the source of the OS called 'NI Linux RT' fork for RT targets (cRIO, PXIs, IC, etc.) , I once heard there was a way to install NI Linux RT on some Intel PCs, never actually seen it though.

Edit : you might want to read this : https://www.ni.com/en/shop/linux/introduction-to-ni-linux-real-time.html

Edited January 26 by Antoine Chalons

[Neil Pate]

12 hours ago, Antoine Chalons said:

Yeah... LabVIEW everywhere was a slogan when LabVIEW RT was released. It was cool at time!

I don't think NI's focus is to make it possible to deploy your LabVIEW code to some cheap hardware that generates no revenue for them...

As for your question about the repo, if I understand correctly, it's the source of the OS called 'NI Linux RT' fork for RT targets (cRIO, PXIs, IC, etc.) , I once heard there was a way to install NI Linux RT on some Intel PCs, never actually seen it though.

Edit : you might want to read this : https://www.ni.com/en/shop/linux/introduction-to-ni-linux-real-time.html

A few years ago I have managed to get RT installed on a regular PC. It seemed to work ok and did some simple tests using the network card, but never used it for anything serious/production, more just to see what was involved. I believe that doing this might be in violation of some licensing agreement.

[Youssef Menjour]

As i understood, we can install LabVIEW RT everywhere in case to know how to modify the linux kernel source code (open source)
It's possible but it seems it mean to have strong knowledge in OS linux dev.

We will start to work on it to deploy LabVIEW RT on jetson. 
New challenge accepted  

Edited January 28 by Youssef Menjour

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

You can NOT install LabVIEW RT on non-NI hardware without a license from NI! And they have so far hesitated or stalled to say if they ever plan to sell such a license.

What you can do is install NI Linux RT on whatever hardware you care since the Linux kernel is GPL software. And that is also what the NI Github repository is about. To provide a means to fulfill the GPL requirement to have the source code to the GPL covered software accessible to any user. What the NI Linux RT Github repository does NOT contain are the LabVIEW RT runtime kernel , NI-VISA, NI-DAQmx, NI-this and NI-that since they are closed source software and the Linux kernel comes with a special GPL clause that allows people to build and distribute closed source software that runs on it. Quite some kernel folks would love to get rid of that clause and force everybody to open source everything everywhere, but that didn't even fully work for kernel drivers, where they did a lot of effort to prevent closed source drivers from being able to do high performance operations.

The big point here is that NI Linux RT is NOT LabVIEW RT. The whole LabVIEW RT runtime and NI driver stack are closed source and you can not install it on random hardware without an according agreement from NI.

If you install NI Linux RT on your Jetson hardware, what you basically get is a somewhat expensive Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone Black board with additional soft RT capabilities but no LabVIEW target support at all! And no, the LabVIEW Hobbyist Toolkit can't be easily repurposed to run with such a hardware either. It's support is limited to ARM Cortex A hardware platforms and you may be able to get the according schroot image installed and running on the Jetson, but that is an entirely different thing than getting NI Linux RT installed on the Jetson. It is legally questionable but maybe you could get away with it, but it is technically quite a suboptimal solution as the schroot environment in which the LabVIEW RT kernel is running is a limited non-RT capable virtual machine running on the normal Linux host on your Jetson.

Edited February 1 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[Youssef Menjour]

Good morning
Ha I hadn't seen this answer!

I don't understand the point of putting NI Linux RT online? What's the point ?

I just want to simply deploy my code to this target that has a GPU.
IN fact what I want is to deploy LabVIEW code on my Jetson target.
I don't want to install LabVIEW RT on my target, I just want to deploy my code as if I were on a machine.

Is this possible on an Ubuntu Arm target as was done on Rasberry PI.
The idea is to use the Jetson GPU for HAIBAL deployments.

I asked NI but they didn't answer me.

who could be our contact at NI ?

Edited April 5 by Youssef Menjour

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

If you use the chroot trick that NI/Digilent did for the Linx/Hobbyist Toolkit it is theoretically doable but far from easy peasy. And you still have to sit down with the NI/Emerson lawyers as I told you before.

However I doubt you want to run your Haibal library in a specially compiled Debian kernel running in a chroot inside your Jetson Linux distro. That is necessary since the entire NI library tree and LabVIEW Runtime is compiled for the arm softeabi that NI uses for their Xilinx XC7000 based realtime targets.

And yes you can NOT run a LabVIEW VI without LabVIEW runtime on the target! Period!

And that NI did put the NI Linux RT source online has nothing to do with that they want to be nice to you or let you build your own LabVIEW realtime hardware but simply because it is the most easy way to comply with the GPL license requirements for the Linux kernel. But those license requirements do not extend to any software they create to run on that Linux kernel, since the kernel license has an explicit exemption for that. Without that exemption there would simply not be any commercial software to run on Linux.

And I understand what you want but that does not make it feasible. I WANT to win the jackpot in the lottery too but so far it never happened and quite certainly never will. 😀

Edited April 5 by Rolf Kalbermatter