Agilent/Keysight 82357A/B USB-to-GPIB Interface
A USB dongle that lets a PC drive instruments on an IEEE-488 (GPIB) bus, the long-standing control interface for oscilloscopes, signal generators, power supplies, and other lab gear. Originally sold by Agilent and now by Keysight, the 82357A and its USB 2.0 successor 82357B have been bench staples since the mid-2000s and remain on sale today.
recommendation
It should stay in the kernel because the hardware is still actively sold by Keysight in 2025 and the driver itself is under active upstream maintenance: it was promoted out of staging into drivers/gpib in November 2025 and received a substantive bug fix in January 2026. Deployment is niche but ongoing in test-and-measurement labs, and there is no in-tree alternative for this specific adapter.
repository signals
sources
- patch.msgid.link
Upstream saw a substantive fix for agilent_82357a in January 2026, indicating current maintenance rather than abandonment.
- patch.msgid.link
The driver was moved out of staging into drivers/gpib in November 2025, showing recent upstream promotion rather than deprecation.
- keysight.com
Keysight still listed the 82357B product page with direct sales / partner sales and buying options, supporting that the hardware remained sold new in 2025/2026.
- helpfiles.keysight.com
Keysight IO Libraries documentation explicitly covers Keysight 82357 USB/GPIB interfaces on Linux and multiple adapters per PC, supporting ongoing real-world deployment in lab/instrument-control setups.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Not a removal candidate. Local source inspection via shell showed a real USB GPIB driver for Agilent/Keysight 82357A/B. Local git history via shell showed only four commits on this path, but two are important: 2025-11-24 destaging into drivers/gpib and 2026-01-27 a real bug fix; the two patch.msgid.link URLs were obtained directly from `git show` output. I attempted lore-first verification with `lei`, but `lei` is not installed here and the advertised lore MCP server is unavailable in this session, so removal-talk checking fell back to local upstream git history. Keysight product and help URLs were obtained with web search/open; they show the 82357B still marketed for sale and documented for Linux. This looks like niche test-and-measurement hardware with low but continuing deployments, and no natural in-tree replacement for the same adapter.