Addressing Meltdown and Spectre in the kernel

Taking a step back, I feel these mitigations, which add more complexity on top of an already incredibly complex system, are acceptable short-term fixes. However, they will also create new opportunities for exploitation.

(Using an analogy in the non-technical world, it's kind of like what happens when you design a more complicated sales compensation plan to stymie basic gaming of an existing plan -- over time gaps and edges in the new system become evident and new, more sophisticated gaming techniques emerge.)

This is really the opportunity for the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction; first, for us to remove some of the black magic in hardware in favor of simpler designs, and second, for us to look at software tooling and design in order to better match the capabilities of modern hardware — in particular, the ability to scale out to multiple cores and systems.