DragonFlyBSD's Meltdown Fix Causing More Slowdowns Than Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 7 January 2018 at 04:06 PM EST. Page 5 of 5. 37 Comments.

At least in most of the CPU benchmarks, the performance hasn't changed.

The Python PyBench performance regressed with these latest patches.

The PHP performance measured by PHPBench also dropped with machdep.isolated_user_pmap enabled on both systems.

The I/O performance remains the most dramatic slowdowns as a result of this Meltdown vulnerability fix. But unlike our bare metal Linux numbers with the same test profiles, in some of the other workloads we are also seeing more noticeable performance degregading from GraphicsMagick to Python to PHP. Hopefully though as DragonFlyBSD 5.1 continues to be developed there will be more performance optimizations in store. We also have yet to see how DragonFlyBSD plans to address the Spectre vulnerability. As covered already, the other BSDs are also still working on their fixes.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.