Chapter 1 Introduction
NI PXI-8109 User Manual 1-6 ni.com
NI-VISA is the National Instruments implementation of the VISA 
specification. VISA is a uniform API for communicating and controlling 
USB, Serial, GPIB, PXI, VXI, and various other types of instruments. 
This API aids in the creation of portable applications and instrument 
drivers. For information on writing your own PXI instrument driver 
with NI-VISA, refer to the NI-VISA Getting Started Manual and the 
readme.txt file in the NI-VISA directory. For more information visit 
ni.com/visa.
With LabVIEW for Linux and support for over two hundred devices on 
Linux with the NI-DAQmx driver, you can now create Virtual Instruments 
based on the Linux OS. Instrument control in Linux has been improved by 
the NI-VISA driver for Linux and NI Modular Instruments are partially 
supported. For more information visit 
ni.com/linux.