The Performance Impact Of Intel's Register File Data Sampling "RFDS" Mitigation

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 15 March 2024 at 03:00 PM EDT. Page 4 of 5. 21 Comments.
PostgreSQL benchmark with settings of Scaling Factor: 100, Clients: 1000, Mode: Read Only. Vulnerable was the fastest.
PostgreSQL benchmark with settings of Scaling Factor: 100, Clients: 1000, Mode: Read Only, Average Latency. Vulnerable was the fastest.
RocksDB benchmark with settings of Test: Random Fill. Vulnerable was the fastest.
RocksDB benchmark with settings of Test: Random Read. Vulnerable was the fastest.
RocksDB benchmark with settings of Test: Sequential Fill. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Speedb benchmark with settings of Test: Random Fill. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Speedb benchmark with settings of Test: Update Random. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Speedb benchmark with settings of Test: Sequential Fill. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Speedb benchmark with settings of Test: Read Random Write Random. Vulnerable was the fastest.

PostgreSQL and other database software on this Raptor Lake Refresh desktop CPU tended to see minor performnace slowdowns with the RFDS mitigation.

Stress-NG benchmark with settings of Test: Mutex. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Stress-NG benchmark with settings of Test: Semaphores. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Stress-NG benchmark with settings of Test: Mixed Scheduler. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Stress-NG benchmark with settings of Test: Socket Activity. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Stress-NG benchmark with settings of Test: Context Switching. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Stress-NG benchmark with settings of Test: System V Message Passing. Vulnerable was the fastest.

Making use of the Stress-NG micro-benchmarks was easy for finding performance penalties due to the Register File Data Sampling mitigation.

ctx_clock benchmark with settings of Context Switch Time. Vulnerable was the fastest.

The context switching time on the Core i9 14900K dropped from 126 to 139 clocks with this new mitigation.


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