Benchmarking The Work-In-Progress Spectre/STIBP Code On The Way For Linux 4.20

Indeed, the performance with the WIP.x86/pti kernel patches is looking good as it should be since these particular tests are not explicitly requesting STIBP via the prctl interface or running under SECCOMP.

It's still shocking to see some of the performance drops that were on the Linux 4.20 tree for weeks before raising a fuss about it last week with our benchmarks when wondering why the 4.20 performance was so awful.

The Linux 4.20 performance out-of-the-box is now looking good.

More of the affected workloads benchmarked can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

The patches in WIP.x86/pti have yet to be mainlined, but still are expected to be accepted for the Linux 4.20 kernel cycle. When that happens, of course, you can expect to read about it on Phoronix and then breathe easily that the Linux 4.20 kernel performance is no longer getting destroyed.

If you have appreciated all of these recent Linux kernel benchmarks, consider showing your support by taking advantage of the Phoronix Black Friday / Cyber Monday offering to help facilitate more tests moving forward.