The General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB, AKA HP-IB) has finally received stable drivers, and will be merged in the Linux 6.19 kernel release, 53 years after it was launched by HP. Phoronix explains that GPIB support was first added to the mainline Linux kernel last year, but now they have been declared stable.
This driver addition was highlighted by Greg Kroah-Hartman in a staging pull request for Linux 6.19-rc1. “Here is the big set of staging driver updates for 6.19-rc1,” wrote Kroah-Hartman. “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.” The dev added that these additions have been tested for a while with no reported problems.
What is GPIB?
GPIB is an ancient interface that was developed by HP back in 1972. It was developed by the influential tech firm as a standard to connect its growing range of lab equipment to computers. The range of GPIB-connected devices would mostly cover things from the realms of electronic test and measurement instruments. That includes oscilloscopes, multimeters, logic analyzers, and more.
Computers of the era lacked a robust standard interface, capable of meeting HP’s needs. This was the same year as Intel introduced the first commercial 8-bit microprocessor, the 8008. The ‘PC industry’ wasn’t even a thing until 1975, with the introduction of the Altair 8800, or some would say 1981, when the first IBM PC arrived.
Of course, this was a long time before the interfaces we are familiar with today like USB, Ethernet, and PCIe, were widespread. (With the 3.5mm headphone jack being a notable exception). Thus, GPIB’s 8‑bit parallel, short‑range, multi‑master bus interface was devised, and it could transfer data at up to 8 MB/s.
From the embedded pictures, you can see GPIB was a pleasingly rugged design, and the connectors could be stacked. The standard, which would later be adopted as IEEE 488, supported up to 15 devices sharing a single physical bus of up to 20 meters (66 ft) total cable length.
The Wikipedia page about GPIB shares pictorial examples of devices using this interface which include an oscilloscope, a multimeter, a plotter, as well as devices that were used by Commodore 64 and Acorn computer users. The faster, more complete SCSI standard would largely be responsible for IEEE 488’s retirement.
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