Is It Worthwhile Running Intel Alder Lake With mitigations=off?

[bobbie424242]

I am hallucinating or Phoronix has been changing a default ? Imagine that, CHANGING A DEFAULT ! Who ever do that in the real world ? /s

[bug77]

Yeah, but I wonder if within a year there aren't a dozen new vulnerabilities exposed with need for additional mitigations.

There always are, no need to wonder.
But I expect the worst is behind us. There are a few years already since this new attack vector has been discovered, plenty of time for protections to be incorporated in the design phase and later. There will be further scenarios that will be exploitable, but they will be fringe cases compared to the initial batches.

[perpetually high]

Zen 3 sees quite a significant performance boost from disabling mitigations.

Source? From my limited pts/osbench benchmarks, practically zero effect disabling mitigations on Zen 3 (5800X). Might have been true before, but no longer true with latest microcodes/patches.

Phoronix post

Openbenchmarking link

[uid313]

Looks like Intel has done a spectacular job of addressing performance regressions related to the use of mitigations. Kudos!

Yeah, but I wonder if within a year there aren't a dozen new vulnerabilities exposed with need for additional mitigations.

[avem]

Looks like Intel has done a spectacular job of addressing performance regressions related to the use of mitigations. Kudos!

Hopefully AMD with follow suit with Zen 4/5. Zen 3 sees quite a significant performance boost from disabling mitigations.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Is It Worthwhile Running Intel Alder Lake With mitigations=off?

Over the past month of trying out Intel Alder Lake processors on Linux, one of the questions that has come up a few times but not readily disclosed is whether it's still worthwhile on this latest-generation process to boot with "mitigations=off" to disable CPU security mitigations to help squeeze out some otherwise lost performance. Here are some benchmarks to answer that questions.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30722