Spectre/Meltdown Mitigations Can Now Be Toggled With Convenient "mitigations=" Option

[oiaohm]

No, I have only just woken up and finished my coffee...

Ugh! this Spectre/Meltdown nonsense could all have been avoided if people stopped playing with toys like systemd, gnome 3 or wayland and got back to real work!

(how was that?)

Of course there is the fact that the ones who work in kernel space mostly don't work in user space so all those working on spectre/meltdown and those working on systemd, gnome, wayland basically have nothing todo with each other. Yes this is why you see some quite nasty flame up between userspace and kernelspace at times.

[chriswyatt]

I set my bootloader up so I have both unmitigated and mitigated options. Only reason is if a game stutters or gets low FPS, I can try it unmitigated and see if that's the cause....it hasn't been the cause yet.

While helpful, all this does is make some my kernel command lines shorter.

This is a good use case for disabling it. I have an emulated game that maxes out a core and is only just playable. I've been looking for ways to squeeze just a little bit more performance, and this might be it.

[cybrnook]

Will this global kill switch at the kernel level also supersede microcode updates that have been implemented at the BIOS/UEFI level or newer BIOSes?