Intel Preparing New Driver Option To Disable GPU Security Mitigations

[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

[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.

[piorunz]

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

[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.

[Michael]

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

As mentioned in the article, there is also a patch to fix the GT1 issue as well.

[JigglypuffSexDoll]

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

Those are literally the only two options, you doofus.

[Guest]

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

Ah yes, enjoy AMD hardware that constantly breaks, doesn't get fixed for months, they don't reveal any info about the important bits like power management, and don't implement it either. Hardware support is always late, and requires you to run Arch Linux and compile the latest commits from main. Major and critical features are heavily delayed and most of the support is finished up 2-3 years after release. Some features will never be supported for no good reason, even though the Windows driver has support for the same.

And NVIDIA hardware support while excellent, doesn't support Wayland in the same way the others do. NVIDIA's politics around Wayland are just crappy.

[hotaru]

Those are literally the only two options, you doofus.

a far more reasonable option than either of those two would be to recall the defective hardware.

[intelfx]

Ah yes, enjoy AMD hardware that constantly breaks, doesn't get fixed for months, they don't reveal any info about the important bits like power management, and don't implement it either. Hardware support is always late, and requires you to run Arch Linux and compile the latest commits from main. Major and critical features are heavily delayed and most of the support is finished up 2-3 years after release. Some features will never be supported for no good reason, even though the Windows driver has support for the same.

And NVIDIA hardware support while excellent, doesn't support Wayland in the same way the others do. NVIDIA's politics around Wayland are just crappy.

As an owner of an AMD platform for two generations now, I can't help but concur with this statement.

[nkalkhof]

Does this also disable the soft-rc6 solution for Gen9 graphics resulting in increased power drain during light workloads?