Kroah-Hartman is one of the world’s leading Linux kernel developers with responsibility for maintaining the stable Linux kernel and is employed by the Linux Foundation as a Fellow. During the talk Kroah-Hartman detailed the root impact and the response of Linux kernel developers for seven different variants of Meltdown and Spectre, though he saved his strongest criticism for Intel’s initial disclosure.
“Jann Horn discovered the first issues in July of 2017 but it wasn’t until Oct. 25 of last year that some of us in the kernel community heard rumors of the flaw,” Kroah-Hartman said. “That’s a long time and we only heard rumors because another very large operating system vendor told Intel to get off their tails and tell us about it.”