
Ubuntu anouncement on Spectre/Meltdown - theptip
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/SpectreAndMeltdown
======
Deimorz
One interesting piece of information from this post is that Intel notified
Ubuntu about the issue on November 9. Project Zero notified Intel on June 1,
so it took over 5 months before they passed it on to Ubuntu (and even longer
for the other vendors).

That seems like an extremely long time to me, when it (I assume) was pretty
obvious that it was going to require OS changes to mitigate.

~~~
eximius
Why would Ubuntu need to be notified? Fixes for this are going to be at the
Linux Kernel level or (at most) Debian upstream. Canonical shouldn't need to
do anything?

~~~
Thaxll
Ubuntu kernel don't rely on Debian. Have you seen how Debian lags behind the
rest in terms of versions.

~~~
subsection1h
Lags behind? Linux kernel version 4.14 is available for Debian Stretch:

[https://packages.debian.org/stretch-backports/linux-image-
am...](https://packages.debian.org/stretch-backports/linux-image-amd64)

------
theptip
> The original coordinated disclosure date was planned for January 9 and we
> have been driving toward that date to release fixes. Due to the early
> disclosure, we are trying to accelerate the release, but we don't yet have
> an earlier ETA when the updates will be released.

~~~
iagooar
What happened that the disclosure was too early?

~~~
Deimorz
People started figuring out some details about the vulnerability from various
public sources (Linux kernel development, previously published security
research), and it was getting a lot of media/internet attention.

The Google blog post from yesterday
([https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/todays-cpu-
vulnerabi...](https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/todays-cpu-
vulnerability-what-you-need.html)) says:

> We are posting before an originally coordinated disclosure date of January
> 9, 2018 because of existing public reports and growing speculation in the
> press and security research community about the issue, which raises the risk
> of exploitation.

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MollyR
Truly disappointing they are behind on this. This should be lighting a fire
under all tech leaders.

