Spectre & KPTI Get More Fixes In Linux 4.16, Offsets Some KVM Performance Losses

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Spectre & KPTI Get More Fixes In Linux 4.16, Offsets Some KVM Performance Losses

While we are past the Linux 4.16 merge window, more Spectre and Meltdown related improvements and changes are still being allowed into the kernel, similar to all the KPTI/Retpoline work that landed late in Linux 4.15. On Wednesday was another big batch of KPTI and Spectre work that has already been merged...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Spectre-Meltdown-More-For-4.16

[wizard69]

These bugs are resulting in a lot of developer distractions.

[Veerappan]

Security should never be viewed as a distraction...

[Mystro256]

Security should never be viewed as a distraction...

Hear hear.

Kernel security should always be of upmost importance.

[FireBurn]

There's still no news on what userspace needs to be compiled with Spectre mitigation flags

[droste]

There's still no news on what userspace needs to be compiled with Spectre mitigation flags

Everything that has an interpreter.

[torsionbar28]

These bugs are resulting in a lot of developer distractions.

Developer distractions result in a lot of security bugs.

[numacross]

A good article was posted by a Netflix engineer on the impact of mitigation: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/201...rformance.html

[Guest]

A good article was posted by a Netflix engineer on the impact of mitigation: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/201...rformance.html

Did netflix finally moved to Linux? FreeBSD is still vulnerable, isn't it?

[numacross]

Did netflix finally moved to Linux? FreeBSD is still vulnerable, isn't it?

They've made FreeBSD serve 90GBit/s of TLS last year (https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/...e-cdb51dda3b99) and I haven't found anything about them doing even similar performance on Linux yet. They are probably using different systems for different things, but we won't know that for sure without insider knowledge