The Downfall Mitigation Impact For Xeon E-2300 Series On Linux 6.5

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 25 September 2023 at 10:40 AM EDT. Page 2 of 3. 3 Comments.

QMCPACK benchmark with settings of Input: FeCO6_b3lyp_gms. mitigations=off, Latest ucode was the fastest.

Similar to the benchmarks carried out in August on an Ice Lake server, Cascade Lake server, and Tiger Lake laptop, the Xeon E-2300 series impact was still very much pronounced for these Rocket Lake CPU cores.

AOM AV1 benchmark with settings of Encoder Mode: Speed 0 Two-Pass, Input: Bosphorus 1080p. Vulnerable, No Microcode was the fastest.

Embree benchmark with settings of Binary: Pathtracer ISPC, Model: Crown. mitigations=off, Latest ucode was the fastest.

Embree benchmark with settings of Binary: Pathtracer ISPC, Model: Asian Dragon. Vulnerable, No Microcode was the fastest.

SVT-AV1 benchmark with settings of Encoder Mode: Preset 4, Input: Bosphorus 1080p. mitigations=off, Latest ucode was the fastest.

OpenVKL benchmark with settings of Benchmark: vklBenchmark ISPC. Vulnerable, No Microcode was the fastest.

The severity of the performance impact depends upon the application's use of AVX gather instructions in any hot code paths. For many applications it can mean a real performance hit, but for those less concerned about Downfall and other CPU security woes, the run-time disabling with "mitigations=off" show the performance at least can be recovered while still using the latest CPU microcode.

OSPRay benchmark with settings of Benchmark: particle_volume/ao/real_time. Vulnerable, No Microcode was the fastest.

OSPRay benchmark with settings of Benchmark: particle_volume/scivis/real_time. mitigations=off, Latest ucode was the fastest.

OSPRay benchmark with settings of Benchmark: particle_volume/pathtracer/real_time. Vulnerable, No Microcode was the fastest.

OSPRay benchmark with settings of Benchmark: gravity_spheres_volume/dim_512/scivis/real_time. Vulnerable, No Microcode was the fastest.

Intel's own OSPRay renderer was one of the workloads I've found to be the most impacted by Downfall.

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