Disclaimer: I work on Linux at Intel. I'll give you an engineer's perspective, and specifically about Meltdown since that's what I worked on. I posted the fir

Disclaimer: I work on Linux at Intel. I'll give you an engineer's perspective, and specifically about Meltdown since that's what I worked on. I posted the first Meltdown mitigations in late October, publicly claiming to mitigate a less dangerous class of side-channel (https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/10/31/884 https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/10/31/884). I figured that Linus would merge it (Linus knew the real reason by that point) and would "wink" at Greg and the other stable maintainers enough to get them to merge it too. At this point, we had months before the embargo ended. In retrospect, that was a kinda silly assumption, but I was heads down trying to get the patch to work and didn't dwell on it much. I wish I would have made more noise about it, especially as we got closer to the embargo ending.