Merged to the mainline Linux kernel last year was GPIB drivers in the kernel’s "staging" area. GPIB is the General Purpose Interface Bus launched by HP back in 1972 for lab equipment and more. After a year of cleaning up the code in the kernel’s staging area, for Linux 6.19 the GPIB drivers have been promoted out of the staging area and into the Linux kernel proper. The Linux kernel now has stable driver support for this 8 Mbyte/s parallel bus that was introduced 53 years ago.

Since being accepted into the kernel’s staging area last year, the GPIB code for supporting vintage lab instruments and other hardware has continued to be cleaned up in newer kernel versions and was nearing the point of graduating staging. That’s thanks to passionate hardware folks with the standard itself being long obsolete thanks to the likes of USB, Firewire, and Ethernet. The Linux kernel’s staging area as a reminder for any new users is effectively a proving grounds / portion of the kernel where code can reside until it’s cleaned-up and in better shape for being formally maintained within the Linux kernel source tree.

Now just ahead of Christmas and with the Linux 6.19 merge window going on, the General Purpose Interface Bus drivers have graduated into the mainline Linux kernel proper. Prior to their appearance in staging last year, they were maintained out-of-tree by vintage hardware enthusiasts. (From the era when SourceForge was popular, there remains out-of-tree Linux GPIB code for the 2.4.x kernels.)

code for the VCHIQ interface used by the Raspberry Pi single board computers. That separate code is done now that the VC04 and VCHIQ code is cleaned up enough to enter the Linux kernel proper that will also make it easier to upstream other Raspberry Pi peripheral driver support moving forward. The VCHIQ is essentially an interface to the audio and accelerated graphics services with the Raspberry Pi firmware.

Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote with today’s staging pull request that has already been merged to Linux 6.19 Git:

"Here is the big set of staging driver updates for 6.19-rc1. Only thing "major" in here is that two subsystems, gpib and vc04 have moved out of the staging tree into the "real" portion of the kernel, which is great to see. Other than that, the rest of the changes are just tiny coding style cleanups, nothing earth-shattering.

All of these have been in linux-next for a while with no reported problems."

A great day for vintage hardware fans with GPIB as well as a great victory for Raspberry Pi users with the mainline kernel tree.