He is one of the lead developers of the Linux kernel, and a co-maintainer of the Ext3 file system, the journaling layer for block devices (JBD) and memory management.

He holds an honours degree in electrical engineering from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

"mm" as a primary testing ground became unmanageably large and busy, and in 2008 the "linux-next" tree was created to fill much of this role.

[citation needed] In July 2003, he joined the Open Source Development Labs under an agreement with his then-employer Digeo Inc. (makers of the Moxi home entertainment media center), in which OSDL supported Morton's Linux kernel development work while he continued in his official role as principal engineer at Digeo.

[5] Morton is also known by his username akpm, as found in e-mail addresses and as part of the URL to his now-defunct webpage.