Wine Performance May Be Impacted By Linux KPTI Patches

Besides VM performance and databases and heavy I/O taking a performance hit in the "Kernel Page Table Isolation" patches in the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown attack, it looks like Wine's performance may also be impaired.

Phoronix reader "R00KIE" pointed out that one of the page table isolation patches does mention a possible performance hit for Wine.

The patch of "x86/pti: Put the LDT in its own PGD if PTI is on" is currently in Linux 4.14 stable (as of v4.14.11) and is also in Linux 4.15 Git as part of the KPTI landing at the end of 2017.

The patch description by Andy Lutomirski mentions, "This will significantly slow down LDT users, but that shouldn't matter for important workloads -- the LDT is only used by DOSEMU(2), Wine, and very old libc implementations." LDT in this context is the Local Descriptor Table.

Most Linux users will be unaffected by the "significant slowdown" but the Wine mention is worrisome especially for those still playing Windows games on Linux. Looks like it's another test to add to my growing TODO list this week/weekend... If you enjoy all my continued testing this week, consider showing your support by going premium, disabling any ad-blockers, or tips via PayPal. Back to the benchmarking.

UPDATE: Confirmed - Wine Takes Minor Performance Hit Running Windows Programs On Linux With KPTI