Spectrum M2p.59 Series, Hardware Manual, Page: 33 / 190

Software Driver Installation Linux
(c) Spectrum Instrumentation GmbH 33
Linux
Overview
The Spectrum M2i/M3i/M4i/M4x/M2p cards and digitizerNETBOX/generatorNETBOX products are delivered with Linux drivers suitable
for Linux installations based on kernel 2.6, 3.x, 4.x or 5.x, single processor (non-SMP) and SMP systems, 32 bit and 64 bit systems. As each
Linux distribution contains different kernel versions and different system setup it is in nearly every case necessary, to have a directly matching
kernel driver for card level products to run it on a specific system. For digitizerNETBOX/generatorNETBOX products the library is suffcient
and no kernel driver has to be installed.
Spectrum delivers pre-compiled kernel driver modules for a number of common distributions with the cards. You may try to use one of these
kernel modules for different distributions which have a similar kernel version. Unfortunately this won’t work in most cases as most Linux system
refuse to load a driver which is not exactly matching. In this case it is possible to get the kernel driver sources from Spectrum. Please contact
your local sales representative to get more details on this procedure.
The Standard delivery contains the pre-compiled kernel driver modules for the most popular Linux distribu -
tions, like Suse, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. The list with all pre-compiled and readily supported distribu -
tions and their respective kernel version can be found under:
http://spectrum-instrumentation.com/en/supported-linux-distributions or via the shown QR code.
The Linux drivers have been tested with all above mentioned distributions by Spectrum. Each of these distri -
butions has been installed with the default setup using no kernel updates. A lot more different distributions
are used by customers with self compiled kernel driver modules.
Standard Driver Installation
The driver is delivered as installable kernel modules together with libraries to access the kernel driver. The installation script will help you with
the installation of the kernel module and the library.
This installation is only needed if you are operating real locally installed cards. For software emulated demo
cards, remotely installed cards or for digitizerNETBOX/generatorNETBOX/hybridNETBOX products it is only
necessary to install the libraries without a kernel as explained further below.
Login as root
It is necessary to have the root rights for installing a driver.
Call the install.sh <install_path> script
This script will try to use the package management of the system to install the kernel module and user-space driver library packages:
• the kernel driver package is called „ spcm “ (M2i, M3i) or „ spcm4 “ (M4i, M4x, M2p)
• the driver library package is called „ libspcm_linux “
Udev support
Once the driver is loaded it automatically generates the device nodes under /dev . The cards are automatically named to /dev/spcm0 ,
/dev/spcm1 ,...
You may use all the standard naming and rules that are available with udev.
Start the driver
The kernel driver should be loaded automatically when the system boots. If you need to load the kernel driver manually use the „modprobe“
command (as root or using sudo):
For M2i and M3i cards:
For M4i, M4x and M2p cards:
Get first driver info
After the driver has been loaded successfully some information about the installed boards can be found in the matching /proc/ file as shown
below. Some basic information from the on-board EEProm is listed for every card.
modprobe spcm
modprobe spcm4