Apologies if this is the wrong forum but...
...This is hard hitting stuff.
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.. for a only hypothetical problem.
Perhaps, perhaps not; a hardware design problem that goes back decades just to get performance figures to sell their CPUs is more than bad to say the least - especially when the manufacturers knew about it.
Also, it can't be that hypothetical if it has been proven to work. It is the big/gigantic sytems that will be affected by these patches not so much the piffling little stuff like my MacBook Pro. I can handle a performance hit knowing about it now but can the big guns? <- Rhetorical!
But unless one has experience of writing kernels and OSes then one can't possibly know how difficult it is to create patches, (that will inherently give a performance hit just to _correct_ a deliberate manufacturing fault for profit), that will not slow things down too much.
The x86 monoculture leads to risks like this.
See also --> OS monoculture...
I read that with the 4.15 Kernel with build-in patches for the hypothetical problem comes with 15-30% performance loss. Immediately I thought 'wow, Intel, AMD and the hardware pushers will earn a lot of $'. I mean todays cpu is so fast that there isn't a need for a upgrade. However the hypothetical problem with the 15-30% performance loss is the need for an upgrade:D. Again everything comes down to $, and nothing else than $.:rolleyes:
That's way overblown, because the performance loss happens during the switch between userspace and kernelspace. Sensible programs don't spend most of their time doing thousands of tiny system calls.
A 30% reduction in performance there is bad, but not the same as a 30% slower computer.