Meltdown and Spectre Patching Has Been a Total Train Wreck

The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, first revealed at the beginning of the year, affect pretty much anything with a chip in it. That ubiquity has made the process of releasing patches understandably arduous. Every type of impacted hardware and software requires its own specially tailored solution, and even a fix that works as intended may slow down system processes as a side effect. The bigger issue so far, though, is that some patches have done more harm than good, requiring recalls and sowing general confusion.

A lot of the focus has fallen on Intel, because all of the company's modern chips are impacted, and the company's attempts to patch the vulnerabilities have seen mixed results. Intel shares the hot seat, though, with fellow chipmakers ARM and AMD. Operating system developers including Microsoft, Apple, and the Linux Group have also been on the hook for providing patches. These fixes, though, can inadvertently cause serious problems beyond processing slowdowns, including random restarts, and even the blue screen of death. Spectre in particular is also more of a class of vulnerability than one easily resolvable bug, so it's proven especially difficult to create one-size-fits-all patches for the flaw.