A Look At The CPU Security Mitigation Costs Three Years After Spectre/Meltdown

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 6 January 2021 at 03:17 PM EST. Page 4 of 9. 26 Comments.
3 Years CPU Security Mitigations
3 Years CPU Security Mitigations

Surprisingly it took until recently for kernel developers to discover AES-NI XTS performance taking a huge hit from Retpolines. Patches are pending to reduce the indirect calls in the AES-NI driver to avoid this significant overhead for processors relying on Retpolines as part of their Spectre V2 mitigations.

3 Years CPU Security Mitigations
3 Years CPU Security Mitigations

So at least soon the AES-XTS performance will be in better shape for the older Intel CPUs and all tested AMD CPUs once those kernel driver improvements land.

3 Years CPU Security Mitigations

For code compilation speed, there only ever tends to be a difference on the older CPU models.

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