Plugable Open Source Hardware Samples Program

From time to time Plugable has extra test hardware around our labs. Rather than have it gather dust, we’d like to send it out to the open source community to help foster driver development.

We know how much work open source driver development is — getting hardware should be the easiest part of it. So today we’re announcing a new program to better get test devices out to developers who can use them.

If you’re a developer with a history submitting patches for Linux or other platforms, please submit your request for Plugable sample hardware here. Because we’ll have only a trickle of each type over device over time, an important part of this is having some idea of what prior driver development contributions you’ve made. We’ll try to focus on matching hardware to the developers most likely to be able to contribute improvements in that area.

Plugable’s products cover a fairly wide range of USB and other devices. See https://plugable.com/shop/ for our products that will be available from time to time under this program.

We’ve long been doing this kind of thing with the commercial vendors. Having worked on Windows and at Microsoft, we try to drop off samples to get them using, testing, and developing against our hardware. We’d do the same for Apple or others. This is our attempt to get these same benefits going with the wider open source community.

We hope this will seed some good things over time. And we welcome any feedback or suggestions on this program anytime.

3 comments on “Plugable Open Source Hardware Samples Program”

  1. Sarah Sharp

    I would love to have any USB 3.0 hosts or devices you have, since I’m the Linux xHCI driver maintainer. Drop me an email if you have any spares.

    • Bernie Thompson

      Sarah, you’ll certainly be at the top of the list for USB 3.0 stuff. Thanks for your work bringing USB 3.0 to Linux!

  2. Bernie Thompson

    We were able to send samples of 3 of our products to Sarah this week: the Plugable USB 3.0 Hard Drive Dock (USB3-SATA-U3), Plugable PCIe USB 3.0 2-port expansion card (PCIE-USB3), and Plugable USB 2.0 graphics adapter (UGA-2K-A).

    We’re glad to have these in the testing mix for Sarah’s work developing the Linux USB 3.0 stack.

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