Certainly not a panic issue for home users of any OS, at least in the present definition of what security is. There is no doubt that it could prove to be a real pain down the road (depending on the provider) for small businesses using older Intel hardware who have purchased virtual space on a server, in that there is a real possibilty that their hardware will no longer be able to log onto their server space which is likely to have the Intel firmware updates, kind of like the changes made to Firefox last summer involving secure connections. If there is no Intel firmware update available for your hardware you may find yourself not able to log onto virtual server space you have paid for that has the Intel firmware updates. That is just the first problem users of Ubuntu, Windows 7, 8.1, Debian, Mac OS, and others running on Intel older hardware will run up against. It is a security issue for industry leaders using Intel hardware to run big server arrays. People like RHEL, Suse Enterprise, Microsoft, and Ubuntu and Debian as well. However, and it's a big however, I would argue at this point that is a rush toward an appearance of better security, but not as grave as it seems in the news. Furthermore given the security measures available to most good administrators, it is a highly unlikely hack unless of course you operate with seriously unvetted administrators. The winners here are likely to turn out to be Intel and Microsoft in the end, given the planned obselescence model of business they use. Want to use our Intel servers? Upgrade your firmware. It seems too brilliant of a business ploy to be anything other than a business ploy. That aside I am not satisfied at all with the mitigations in Linux for meltdown as I and a lot of other people think the action is too extreme, given the neccessity of then having to deal with propietary firmware updates. We all need to take a deep breath here and take the time to study the mitigations thorougly. It has been proved time and time again that computing security is best enabled via the open source community, period.

TC