Looking At The Linux Performance Two Years After Spectre / Meltdown Mitigations

[duby229]

Are you sure that HW mitigations have the exact same impact as SW mitigations?
And, why?

Well if you look at the bar graphs some of those results show the newer chip with hardware mitigations performing much worse than the chips without hardware mitigations. Even though the software mitigations don't much affect the result, the result is that some of those results for chips with hardware mitigations much worse than the chips without hardware mitigations even when using the software mitigations.

Just look at some of the GEGL, GIMP, and OSbench results.... The software mitigations don't much affect that one chip, but that one chip is performing much worse than the comparable older chip. I'd even go so far as to say the hardware mitigations on the newer chip are impacting performance much worse than the software mitigations are on the comparable older chip.

[nomadewolf]

Why do you think that the hardware mitigations would not have the same performance penalty? The fix is the same regardless of if it's done in hw or sw.

Are you sure that HW mitigations have the exact same impact as SW mitigations?
And, why?

[F.Ultra]

Am I reading this wrong or are some of the hardware mitigations on the 10xxx series just as inefficient as the software ones except that you cannot switch them off? Nicely done.

Why do you think that the hardware mitigations would not have the same performance penalty? The fix is the same regardless of if it's done in hw or sw.

[MadCatX]

Am I reading this wrong or are some of the hardware mitigations on the 10xxx series just as inefficient as the software ones except that you cannot switch them off? Nicely done.

[slacka]

NoScript + "mitigations=off" for the Win. Don't run untrusted software? No need to lose all your performance.

[johannesburgel]

Honestly, Michael: This kind of content should only be available to paying subscribers for the first week after publication.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Looking At The Linux Performance Two Years After Spectre / Meltdown Mitigations

Last week marked the two year anniversary since the formal public disclosure of the Spectre and Meltdown disclosures. To commemorate that anniversary, I was running some fresh benchmarks of various Intel desktop and server processors with the in-development Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to look at the performance impact today with the default CPU vulnerability mitigations and then again with the mitigations disabled at run-time.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=28777