Snapdragon processor / chipset compatibility

[jmorris]

Hello all you helpful forum-goers!

I have received reports of the new Snapdragon processor (e.g., Snapdragon X Elite or Snapdragon X Plus) getting blue screen of death after customers install my company's software (which is developed using LabVIEW 2021).  Our software installs NI VISA drivers for use of RS-422 COM ports but is otherwise pretty vanilla.

I have been searching online for any information on compatibility or incompatibility between LabVIEW and Snapdragon processors, but I haven’t managed to find any yet.

Does anyone have any information on whether this is a known issue, and if so any way to mitigate it?

Thank you in advance for your time and assistance!

[santo_13 · Accepted solution]

In short, it could be because NI device drivers don't support ARM or RISC architecture yet and support only x86/x64

Related topic - https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA03q000001DsFACA0&l=en-US

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

This is indeed an unsupported combination. Snapdragon CPUs are ARM based and the only way I see how you could have gotten this even remotely working is likely through one of the Windows 10 or Windows 11 for ARM OS installations. Windows on these platforms contains an emulation layer that can run Win32 apps that are compiled for the x86 platform but there used to be problems that this emulator didn't support all the MMX and MMX2 instructions but LabVIEW can’t be convinced to not use them when compiling VIs since 2017 or so.

Possibly the emulator in current Windows versions has improved to support those but I wouldn’t bet on that.

The emulator does definitely NOT translate the kernel space environment in which device drivers are loaded and while VISA for serial ports and ethernet does not need device drivers itself, it is complex enough that it may try to load some support kernel drivers that are necessary to support GPIB, MXI, PXI and PCI devices.

But the main takeout from this is that even if you didn’t use VISA at all, Windows for ARM is not a supported platform for NI software.

[jmorris]

Thank you both!  This is exactly the information I needed.