KernelTrap Interview With Rusty Russell 150
Jeremy Andrews writes "KernelTrap has interviewed Rusty Russell, a humorous and productive contributer to Linux Kernel development. Author of ipchains, netfilter/iptables, futexes, per-cpu counters, hot pluggable CPU support, and the new in-kernel module loading code, Rusty's efforts have had a significant impact on the upcoming 2.6 kernel. For a humorous sample of Rusty's wit, one only needs to look at his email signature which reads, 'Anyone who quotes me in their sig is an idiot. -- Rusty Russell.'" Rusty is a great guy, and this is a worthwhile read.
... and the most important thing about Rusty (Score:4, Interesting)
Leader of the Kstrdup Core Team!
Way to go IBM! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hot pluggable CPU support (Score:5, Interesting)
We work with these things [stratus.com] all the time. You can yank CPUs while its running and it won't even hiccup. You can open the side of the case and take a whiz in it, and the machine will keep chugging. Cool stuff.
They apparently have permission to modify Windows source to make that stuff work, but linux support would be nice.
Re:Plagarist! (Score:2, Interesting)
It's like a curse.
Did you know he also played for the NFL? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm willing to bet Rusty is the first person to both a pro football player and kernel developer
personal highlights (Score:4, Interesting)
Impressive little "throwaway project"!!
JA: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Rusty Russell: I love that noone needs my permission to take my code and do something cool with it, and someone else can do the same with that code. I love that an "end user" is usually only a few hours work away from being an active documenter, bugreporter, web-mistress or coder in most projects.
As a result, I despise anything which artificially raises barriers to entry for programmers and users. Everything from stupid software patents, to bad user interfaces, cabalesque knowledge and crummy code. These quotes highlighted the interview for me but the whole thing was great.
Re:libiptc (Score:2, Interesting)
I haven't touched that API in ages, but it's pretty horrible. This came up at the last netfilter summit, and it's becoming a big problem. Harald did some excellent work on his rework, but it's fundamentally trying to do two different things: support extensions which are in the kernel, and support the command language extensions required for iptables itself. This shows up clearly when you want to use it for something other than iptables.
> It's pretty confusing to use, and his asshole wit shows up in what little documentation there is.
*shrug* There's only so much you can do with documentation. What's needed is a rewrite: fortunately, Harald's plkttables looks promising, unfortunately, it's a long way off 8(. The documentation which is there is about writing extensions, not using the library directly.
As for the wit, I agree: it's not for everyone, and can make bad documentation worse.
Cheers,
Rusty.