Going back to 1972 is the General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB, a.k.a. IEEE-488) as a parallel interface bus developed by HP. GPIB pre-dates the Linux kernel itself while it wasn’t until last year that the GPIB driver subsystem was added to the Linux kernel’s staging area with GPIB still seeing some use by scientific equipment and other devices. For Linux 6.15, the GPIB code has seen a thorough round of code clean-ups and improvements.
The General Purpose Interface Bus allows for 8 Mb/s communication speeds with lab/scientific equipment and other devices. Most modern laboratory equipment has migrated to USB or other newer interfaces while for those with older equipment, there’s evidently interest in pushing this GPIB code further along in the Linux kernel. The Linux 6.15 staging updates are dominated by GPIB driver updates providing various code clean-ups, fixing some kernel oops scenarios, and other code fixes. GPIB changes represent the bulk of the staging changes this kernel cycle.
Aside from GPIB driver changes, there are some rtl8723bs WiFi/WLAN driver clean-ups and a few other small clean-ups.
Staging maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman describes the Linux 6.15 staging updates in the pull as:
“Here is the big set of staging driver cleanups and updates for 6.15-rc1. As expected, with the introduction of the gpib drivers, loads of cleanups and fixes showed up, with the huge majority of changes being for that chunk of drivers. This is good and shows that the community can fix up things in public when asked to. Also included in here are:
– small sm750fb cleanups
– tiny rtl8723bs cleanups
– more vchiq_arm cleanups and changes, hopefully this will get out of staging soon.”
Linus Torvalds has already merged these changes for advancing the GPIB support in 2025.
