The Performance Impact Of Intel's Register File Data Sampling "RFDS" Mitigation

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 15 March 2024 at 03:00 PM EDT. Page 3 of 5. 21 Comments.
Hackbench benchmark with settings of Count: 16, Type: Thread. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Hackbench benchmark with settings of Count: 16, Type: Process. Vulnerable was the fastest.

To no surprise the Hackbench scheduler benchmark saw a performance hit.

OpenSSL benchmark with settings of Algorithm: SHA512. Vulnerable was the fastest.
OpenSSL benchmark with settings of Algorithm: RSA4096. Vulnerable was the fastest.
OpenSSL benchmark with settings of Algorithm: ChaCha20. Vulnerable was the fastest.
OpenSSL benchmark with settings of Algorithm: AES-256-GCM. Vulnerable was the fastest.

The OpenSSL performance hit was minor.

Dragonflydb benchmark with settings of Clients Per Thread: 20, Set To Get Ratio: 1:10. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Memcached benchmark with settings of Set To Get Ratio: 1:5. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Memcached benchmark with settings of Set To Get Ratio: 1:10. Vulnerable was the fastest.
Memcached benchmark with settings of Set To Get Ratio: 1:100. Vulnerable was the fastest.

There was a clear performance hit to the Memcached performance with this new RFDS mitigation.


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