The Spectre/Meltdown Performance Impact On Linux 4.20, Decimating Benchmarks With New STIBP Overhead

Linux 4.20 adds some overhead to the Intel performance for code compilation.

Like with the Intel Core i9 7980XE and other test boxes, Node.js performance is slower with Linux 4.20.

The AOBench renderer was also found to be slowed down by the Linux 4.20 kernel.

Minion's Solitaire benchmark was another one of the extreme cases where when moving to Linux 4.20 caused the dual Xeon Gold server from being the front-runner to being in last place behind the EPYC CPUs, unless disabling the Spectre V2 mitigation to turn off STIBP.

There are a lot more workloads showing an impact by STIBP but usually to not such extremes.