The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel will add support for the Line 6 POD HD Pro X audio effects processor that has been in the market for several years now -- the past decade! -- but only now seeing the necessary additions for Linux support.

The Line 6 POD HD Pro X is a multi-effects processor popular with guitarists that retails currently for ~$549. This rack-mountable device has support queued up for working with what will be the mainline Linux 6.19 kernel

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.18-rc4 as the latest weekly test release. Linux 6.18 is looking to be in good shape for potentially releasing on-time at the end of November otherwise the first week of December.

Linux 6.18-rc4 is appearing to be in good shape though thee a few changes worth mentioning for the week. Linux 6.18-rc4 has an assortment of small graphics driver fixes, new AMD Zen 6 model IDs and fixing

Slipping under my radar in October was the release of NASM 3.00 and the follow-up NASM 3.01 release shortly there after. This widely-used open-source assembler is now ready with support for Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions ( APX ) and AVX10 .

NASM 3.0 released a few weeks back with the headline functionality being support for APX and AVX10 instruction sets. Plus new pre-processor functions including %b2hs(), %chr()

Merged this weekend ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc4 test kernel release due out later today is the "x86/fixes" for the week. There are a few notable changes on the x86 (x86_64) side of the kernel this week for Linux 6.18 .

First up, more AMD Zen 6 CPU model IDs are now recognized by the kernel as part of enabling these next-generation processors for Linux. As covered when the kernel patch

Open-sourced at the start of the calendar year was Perforator as a continuous profiling tool to find code inefficiencies . Yandex who open-sourced it claimed that it could lead businesses to saving "billions of dollars a year on server infrastructure." It's been a few months since the last feature release but out this weekend is Perforator 0.0.7.

Perforator has continued evolving for continuous performance profiling since it was open-sourced back in January. Perforator switched to an Apache 2.0 license and dropped

Steam on Linux use has hit an all-time high! With the Steam Survey results for October 2025 coming out this evening, Steam on Linux has finally cracked the 3% threshold! A few months back Steam on Linux was close to 3% before stumbling a bit but now it's above that elusive threshold. The only time Steam on Linux use was close to the 3% mark was when Steam on Linux initially debuted a decade ago and at that time the overall Steam user-base was

The fourth and final beta of FreeBSD 15 is out today for testing with the official release continuing to align for an early December debut.

The FreeBSD 15 development cycle has brought success around reproducible builds, better hardware support especially among laptops and WiFi devices and more, various desktop experience enhancements, and a ton of other updates both for kernel and user-space. With FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 4 there are yet more WiFi driver updates. This new release has pulled in the Intel IWLWIFI, Realtek RTW8

Debian developer Julian Andres Klode sent out a message on Halloween that may give some Debian Linux users and developers a spook: the APT packaging tool next year will begin requiring a Rust compiler. This will place a hard requirement by Debian Linux on Rust support for all architectures. Debian CPU architectures with ports currently but lacking Rust support will either need to see support worked on or be sunset.

Julian sent out the message on Friday that he plans to introduce hard Rust dependencies on APT no earlier than May 2026.

Open-source developer Joel Severin today announced his work on porting the Linux kernel to WebAssembly and has successffully gotten the kernel up and running within WASM-capable web browsers.

This WebAssembly port of the Linux kernel is up and running basic programs from a shell within a web browser. But there are stability issues and it didn't take me long either to trigger crashes for this Linux kernel WASM port when running within Google Chrome.