I had to deal with this today. It is a real pain in the ass and I have some insight for anyone that cares.
First - why did I have to deal with it? The mass patching has already begun and the cloud and ISP level. The patches are rolling. Therefore, it requires my attention.
Second - Do I think there will be any major impact? No. it is annoying as fuck. Especially since I feel like this is a well known exploit and there has been mass collusion to orchestrate the announcement and patches. The end result is going to be revenue for the hardware and software companies involved.
INTEL, AMD, NVIDIA, MICROSOFT, APPLE, LINUX/UNIX, ARM? Give me a fucking break. Look at that list again. What the fuck else is there?
So - remember the Apple battery slowdown debacle. I know - it was only in the last couple of weeks that they were caught red-handed building in a guaranteed upgrade due to battery age and purposeful throttling. This "patching" is liable to do just that - right under our noses. 5-30% performance hit? Gee - I wonder how many people will upgrade to "New, Harder Kernels with better performance!" Yeah - pretty much everyone. Stinks like shit.
Also, making the details public assures higher risk of attack vectors by knuckleheads. I am sure this is a well known vulnerability to folks like the NSA. What will they build into this "next generation?" Fuck this shit.
The entire thing smells like shit. People will start thinking about all that GPU based crypto processing going on right now and the chips in their hardware wallets etc and the crypto market could crash and burn off this too. Anyone think of that yet? Just wait.
Again - the entire thing smells like shit. I don't think there is really that big of a risk to machines operating inside private networks or running EPP etc. But - the patches will be forced. GG. Fuck everyone. Fuck you too. Stay off my fucking lawn.