Red Hat got into a bit of a PR snafu this week after it pulled from distribution a CPU microcode update meant to address the Spectre Variant 2 CPU design flaw. The Register, the tech news site that broke the story about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in processors earlier this month, characterized the move as Red Hat washing its hands of the responsibility to provide customers with firmware patches to address the vulnerability by instructing them to get firmware updates from their hardware vendors instead.