Microsoft to make Windows Server Meltdown/Spectre patches optional, recommended

I'm posting this because there has been a great deal of - hm, what's the opposite of FUD? - shall we say fearlessness, ambivalence, and trust (FAT) in operating system vendors about the performance impact of Meltdown and Spectre.

This fearlessness, ambivalence, and trust is unearned. The performance costs are significant enough that Microsoft is recommending these patches for many, but not all server use cases. The performance impact on high network and disk IO devices in particular will be significant.

I've been very disappointed in the response from operating system vendors which has been misleading. These patches are absolutely necessary for most (if not all) servers, but vendors are downplaying the performance impact which will affect compute budgets going forward for many years.