Comment by xoa
5 years ago
I didn't mean to spin this for Netgate. But Donenfeld hasn't seemed to want to make a big thing over it, and I just wanted to try to respect that for a summary. Kind of figured anyone really interested would read the stories and comments and get the gory details, but I'm genuinely sorry if you felt I disrespected the situation by being too breezy. And I do think there was an impressive rally to try to meet an admittedly artificial deadline and get something better in place rather then letting it slide or throwing more bombs then necessary. I do recognize it was serious.
I was linked back to your reply because it seems that I've not really communicated this very well- there's nothing wrong specifically with how you represented the situation, and I'm sorry if I came across as angry about you specifically. Read the rest of this in that same tone.
I'm angry that this has blown up like it has, and I realize that Netgate hasn't helped themselves out at all with the statements they've been releasing. If I was a PR person, my immediate reaction would have been "Hey, we're pulling this from the build. Know you guys were all excited about it, but points to press release"
I'm trapped here, you know? I can't speak for the proportions of how bad it was because I'm just a kernel guy, not a security guy. If I say "I don't think it was really that bad," I can pretty much immediately be written off as unqualified to make those kinds of statements.
We did end up nearly entirely rewriting the driver, but a significant chunk of that was removing iflib to fix a load of vnet issues and simplify it. I'm proud of what we ended up with, but I'm not proud of how this was handled by pretty much everyone around me.
Finally, to me, the deadline was very real. I thought we could end up with something that I'd be able to merge in time for 13.0rc3 (builds started today) in a relatively non-disruptive manner. It wasn't until most of the time was up that time had passed until I realized what we had come up with, and started hoping that I could still pull it off with significant testing.