[$] The effect of Meltdown and Spectre in our communities

A late-breaking development in the computing world led to a somewhathastily arranged panel discussion at this year's linux.conf.au in Sydney.The embargo for the Meltdown and Spectrevulnerabilities broke on January 4; three weeks later, Jonathan Corbet convenedrepresentatives from five separate parts of our community, from cloud tokernel to the BSDs and beyond. As Corbet noted in the opening, the panelitself was organized much like the response to the vulnerabilitiesthemselves, which is why it didn't even make it onto the conference scheduleuntil a few hours earlier.