I say it'd always best practice to update things via the standard package manager. I'm sure debain/RHEL/cent repos already have updated kernels for the PTI fix.

I say it'd always best practice to update things via the standard package manager. I'm sure debain/RHEL/cent repos already have updated kernels for the PTI fix. Unless you are seriously hitting hard performance issues with the new kernels (there's nothing in the firmware page that says if this is for Meltdown or Spectre, or did I miss it?), wait for your distribution to update its linux-firmware package. People on the unstable branches will get to test it first and give appropriate feedback before it gets marked stable, and there will also most likely be a delay before a kernel is released that re-enabled PTI (once again, if this is a PTI/Meltdown fix).