Linux

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.