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 5 of 5. 21 Comments.

nginx benchmark with settings of Connections: 1000. Vulnerable was the fastest.

Should you be running the Nginx web server on affected Atom / E core parts, there was around a 4% performance hit with the new RFDS mitigation rolled out this week.

Selenium benchmark with settings of Benchmark: Jetstream 2, Browser: Firefox. Vulnerable was the fastest.

Selenium benchmark with settings of Benchmark: SilverBench, Browser: Firefox. Vulnerable was the fastest.

Selenium benchmark with settings of Benchmark: PSPDFKit WASM, Browser: Firefox. Vulnerable was the fastest.

Selenium benchmark with settings of Benchmark: Speedometer 3.0, Browser: Firefox. Vulnerable was the fastest.

Selenium benchmark with settings of Benchmark: Jetstream 2, Browser: Google Chrome. Vulnerable was the fastest.

Selenium benchmark with settings of Benchmark: PSPDFKit WASM, Browser: Google Chrome. Mitigated was the fastest.

Selenium benchmark with settings of Benchmark: Speedometer 3.0, Browser: Google Chrome. Vulnerable was the fastest.

The performance impact for the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers was small but consistent with disabling the RFDS mitigation leading to slightly better results.

So for those wondering, yes, there is a performance cost involved with this Register File Data Sampling (RFDS) mitigation on affected Intel Atom / E-core processors. Over the weekend I'll continue running more RFDS benchmarks on a few other affected Intel processors under Linux.

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