0. fucking put the pressure on Intel and other chip makers to have microcode updates ready by NYE, like, you know, 6 months after the first report

1. make sure all tier 1 companies involved are equally patched and on the same page as far as mitigations go before EOY, then involve tier 2 companies (see news on "the impromptu war room") a full month before the embargo deadline

2. not commit or patch anything or fly commented diffs around in the freaking public LKML; git branches to be tested and secondary mailing lists can be private if only for a brief period of time

That's definitely not what happened, and probably the dirty details have not surfaced yet. I can't wait for this to be reasonably over so we can start to read post mortem on the whole process.