Linux Finally Adds Stable Support For Hardware From The Disco Era

You know how we sometimes joke about software updates taking forever? Like, you’re sitting there staring at a progress bar thinking, “I could have raised a child in the time it took to install this security patch.”

Well, the Linux kernel team just looked at our impatience and said, “Hold my beer.”

In a move that delights tech archaeologists and lab technicians everywhere, the Linux 6.19 kernel has officially added “stable” driver support for GPIB. If you’re scratching your head wondering what that is, don’t worry. This tech is likely older than you are. In fact, it’s older than Star Wars.

Let’s dive into why an interface from 1972 is suddenly making headlines in the open-source world and why this chunky, gray cable standard is actually kind of a legend.

Better Late Than Never

So, here is the deal. The General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) has been around since the days when bell bottoms were unironic fashion statements. It was created by HP (yes, the printer guys, but back when they made cool science gear) around 53 years ago.

Recently, the maintainers of the Linux kernel decided it was finally time to graduate the drivers for this interface from the “staging” area to the main, stable branch.

For those of you who aren’t deep into kernel development, the “staging” tree is basically the minor leagues. It’s where drivers go to get tested, fixed up, and proven worthy before they get called up to the majors. Greg Kroah-Hartman, who is basically a wizard in the Linux world, highlighted this in the pull request for Linux 6.19-rc1. He noted that the GPIB subsystem (along with something called vc04) had finally moved out of staging.

Basically, after half a century of existence and a year of testing in the Linux staging area, the code is now considered rock-solid. No reported problems. It works. It’s stable. If you were holding off on building a Linux rig to control your 1970s frequency counter because you were worried about driver stability, your time has come.

What on Earth is GPIB?

If you’ve never worked in a university physics lab or messed around with vintage electronic repair, you might not have seen a GPIB connector in the wild.

In 1972, connecting computers to external hardware was the Wild West. There was no USB. There was no Bluetooth. If you wanted to hook a computer up to a multimeter, you usually had to wire it up yourself with a soldering iron and a prayer.

HP stepped in and invented the HP-IB (Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus). It was designed to let engineers connect controllers, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and other nerdy measurement tools to a computer. It was an 8-bit parallel bus, which sounds adorable by today’s standards, but back then it was high-tech wizardry.

The coolest thing about it? The physical design.

These connectors are absolute units. They are chunky, industrial-grade plugs that feature a unique “stackable” design. You could plug one cable into an instrument, and then plug another cable directly into the back of the first connector. It was like LEGO for data transmission. You could daisy-chain up to 15 different devices together on a single run of cable (up to about 20 meters total).

It wasn’t just HP playing in this sandbox, either. The industry looked at what HP did, nodded in approval, and standardized it as IEEE 488 in 1975. This meant you could buy a device from one brand and a controller from another, and they would actually talk to each other without catching fire.

The Vintage Computing Connection

While GPIB started as a tool for serious scientists in white coats, it eventually trickled down to the home computing market, albeit in slightly weirder forms.

If you know anyone who loves the Commodore 64 or the Commodore PET, ask them about the IEEE 488 bus. Commodore used a version of this standard for their disk drives and printers. It was notoriously slow on the C64 due to some implementation quirks (and by quirks, I mean cost-cutting), but it was robust.

Acorn computers also jumped on the bandwagon. For a brief shining moment in the late 70s and early 80s, before SCSI took over the world and long before USB was even a sparkle in Intel’s eye, GPIB was the king of connectivity.

Why Do We Care Today?

You might be asking, “Shyam, why is Linux wasting time on a 50-year-old standard?”

That’s the beauty of Linux. It runs everything.

Go to any major university, a government research facility, or a manufacturing plant that has been running since the 80s. You will find mission-critical equipment that relies on GPIB. These machines—spectrum analyzers, signal generators—are built like tanks. They don’t break. They still work perfectly fine for the physics experiments they were bought for in 1985.

The computers that control them, however, do die.

By having stable, native support in the modern Linux kernel, a researcher can take a brand-new Raspberry Pi or a modern laptop, slap a USB-to-GPIB adapter on it, and control a piece of vintage hardware with modern software. It bridges a five-decade gap. It allows us to keep using perfectly good electronics instead of throwing them in a landfill just because the interface is “old.”

The Tech That Refuses to Die

It is fascinating to look at the timeline here.

• 1972: HP invents the bus. The Godfather is in theaters. The Intel 8008 processor launches (it had about as much computing power as a modern toaster).
• 1981: The IBM PC launches.
• 1990s: SCSI and later USB start to push older interfaces out of the consumer market.
• 2023: Linux adds GPIB to the mainline kernel.
• 2024/2025: It becomes “stable.”

The transfer speeds maxed out around 8 MB/s. That is laughable if you are trying to move 4K video, but if you are just sending simple commands like “measure voltage now” or “plot this graph,” it is instant.

So, here is a toast to the Linux maintainers. They ensure that no matter how fast technology moves forward, we don’t completely lose touch with where we came from. Plus, those stackable connectors are still satisfying to click together.

If you have any old HP test gear gathering dust in your garage, maybe it is time to fire up a Linux distro and see if you can get it talking again. The drivers are ready when you are.

• Tags:
• Kernel
• Open Source
• Commodore