* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16074531
That is hardly enough time, considering that it is likely a holiday period for most of the people concerned, to prepare what needed to be prepared. Google and Intel gave themselves six months, in contrast, and they gave Ubuntu since November 2017.
I still haven't nailed down how much advanced notice Matthew Dillion, author of DragonFly BSD, was given; although his apparent level of preparedness with patches on 2018-01-05 can be attributed to the fact that he actually talked publicly about the problem in April 2017, months before Google Project Zero secretly reported it to processor manufacturers in June 2017 in the first place.
Correct, but it’s significantly better than OpenBSD’s timeline (which learnt about it from the media). Mitigation for Meltdown is possible within of a week, or two. It requires working through the night, but it’s possible.
Mitigation after it’s in the media is a whole different situation.