Intel Preparing New Driver Option To Disable GPU Security Mitigations

[Michael]

Michael, do you have any Haswell machines to run a quick graphics benchmark on the patch with mitigations enabled and disabled? It would be nice to see how much of a performance benefit users could expect to see if they're giving up security.

No Haswell GT1 well I might have some haswell pentium somewhere but not easy access in a rack. When the mitigation option handling is mainlined will try it on some other haswell hardware.

[piorunz]

So that's their solution? Disabling mitigations, putting users at risk?
Glad I don't own any Intel hardware.

[OpenSourceAnarchist]

Michael, do you have any Haswell machines to run a quick graphics benchmark on the patch with mitigations enabled and disabled? It would be nice to see how much of a performance benefit users could expect to see if they're giving up security.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Preparing New Driver Option To Disable GPU Security Mitigations

Stemming from the renewed attention this week of Haswell GT1 graphics being broken for the past half-year under Linux with the latest versions of the kernel, a revised patch was sent out to restore that graphics support for low-end Haswell Celeron/Pentium processors. As part of that, a new option is being introduced to allow disabling security mitigations of the Intel graphics driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-i915-mitigations-off-Opt