Rusty Russell is a Linux kernel hacker living in Australia, working for IBM's Linux Technology Center. He's also a frequent and talented speaker at Linux gatherings. When talking about Rusty in an earlier interview, Andrew Morton summarized, "he's just a really sharp and witty guy - anyone who has attended one of his sessions at a conference will attest to that!"

Well known for his packet filtering efforts, having written both ipchains and netfilter/iptables, he has continued to make an impressive number of contributions to Linux kernel development. A large sampling of his current projects have been merged into the upcoming 2.6 kernel, including futexes, per-cpu counters, hot pluggable CPU support, and a complete rewrite of the in-kernel module loading code.

For a humorous sample of Rusty's wit, one only needs to look to his email signature which reads, "Anyone who quotes me in their sig is an idiot. -- Rusty Russell." Read on for the full interview.