Agilent/Keysight 82350A/B and 82351A PCI GPIB controller cards
PCI plug-in cards from Agilent (now Keysight) that let a PC talk to bench instruments — oscilloscopes, signal generators, power supplies and the like — over the IEEE-488/GPIB bus widely used in test and measurement labs from the 1990s onward. The 82350B has been marked obsolete by Keysight in favour of the newer 82350C, but the older cards still turn up in long-lived lab and industrial test rigs.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as legacy. The 82350B is officially obsolete at Keysight and the successor 82350C is what's sold new today, so deployments are limited to existing lab and industrial test setups. However, the GPIB subsystem was only just promoted out of staging into drivers/ in November 2025 and a substantive fix landed in January 2026, so the code is actively maintained and removal would be premature.
repository signals
sources
- spinics.net
The driver had a real upstream fix posted on January 16, 2026, indicating current maintenance rather than abandonment.
- spinics.net
The GPIB stack, including this driver directory, was explicitly destaged into drivers/ in November 2025, which is strong evidence of recent subsystem investment.
- keysight.com
Keysight marks the 82350B PCI GPIB card as Obsolete and names 82350C as the replacement product.
- keysight.com
Keysight still markets the 82350C PCI GPIB card, showing the use case remains relevant even though 82350B hardware is obsolete.
- docs.keysight.com
Keysight's Linux IO support documentation still lists PCI/PCIe GPIB hardware as supported, consistent with ongoing niche lab/industrial deployments.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection showed a real PCI driver with IDs for 82350A/82350B/82351A and recent non-treewide history; local `git -c safe.directory=... log` showed a substantive January 2026 fix plus the November 2025 destaging. Web search found the active maintenance patch on spinics and the gpib destaging thread; separate web searches found Keysight's official 82350B obsolete page, current 82350C product page, and Linux IO support FAQ. I found no removal-thread evidence in the available searches. Net: hardware is legacy/obsolete, deployments are likely niche legacy test setups, but upstream attention is recent enough that removal/deprecation would be premature; annotate as legacy instead.