Spectre/Meltdown Performance Impact Across Eight Linux Distributions

The basic ctx_clock program for demonstrating the number of clocks to complete a context switch shows much more dramatic overhead on the enterprise distributions and their older kernels.

The memcached benchmarks were a similar story to the other benchmarks carried out.

Lastly is a look at the geometric mean of all the benchmarks that successfully ran on the eight tested Linux distributions. On Linux distributions like Ubuntu 18.10 and Clear Linux the mitigation costs were about ~18% while both RHEL 8 Beta and openSUSE 15.0 had a nearly 40% hit. Cent OS 7 overall had less of a performance hit on its older kernel but the raw performance is much less with its aging software components. For both mitigated and unmitigated, to no surprise Intel's Clear Linux operating system was the fastest.