content: Firstly, Linus can't patch the kernel without Intel's help.  There is physically no way to do it. It requires changes to the processors microcode itself.  And Linus is reliant on Intel to provide those changes and the instructions on how to used them. Secondly, It's not so much the patches themselves are bad (as far as I know the patches do what they are suppose to do although they do apparently ignore the faster alternative the kernel team already developed that works on everything but Skylake processors). It's that the method proposed by Intel to fix the issues requires horrible changes to kernel software that by their very nature are awful (whether the patches are written by Linus himself or by Intel the result is going to be garbage).   Intel has no desire to actually fix the issue.  What they have done is introduce microcode changes that provide instructions that can mitigate the problem but Intel has put the onus on the OS developers to implement them.  This way they don't have to take the performance hit right out of the gate. By default the chip will run insecurely but fast (and I'll bet you they'll be touting those benchmarks).  Once you secure the chip the performance drops but that's not Intel's fault, that's a software issue (or at least that is how they will spin it).