OpenSUSE Adds Option To Installer For Toggling Performance-Hitting CPU Mitigations

Written by Michael Larabel in SUSE on 22 May 2019 at 07:28 PM EDT. 25 Comments
SUSE
With the newly released openSUSE Leap 15.1 they have added an option to their installer for toggling the CPU mitigations around Spectre / Meltdown / Foreshadow / Zombieload to make it very convenient should you choose to retain maximum performance while foregoing the security measures. But it also allows disabling SMT/HT from the installer should you prefer maximum security.

When installing openSUSE Leap 15.1 today, I was a bit surprised to see a "CPU mitigations" option that allows toggling the value similar to the mitigations= kernel command line option.


This is the first major Linux distribution installer I've seen that makes it so easy and visible to change the CPU mitigations. Though to novice users they could be left wondering what it's all about or even accidentally turning it off, but we'll see. Hopefully more Linux distributions educate their users on the performance costs to these mitigations and make it so easy to tune the mitigations.


It's useful just not for disabling the mitigations but also for setting auto,nosmt given that it's looking like Hyper Threading is insecure.


In case you missed it, this week I did run fresh benchmarks looking at the mitigated costs for servers, desktops, and a laptop. Additional Zombieload and Meltdown/Spectre/L1TF/MDS tests are forthcoming on Phoronix.
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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.

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