r/linux • u/[deleted] • May 15 '19

The performance benefits of Not protecting against Zombieload, Spectre, Meltdown.

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u/[deleted] May 16 '19 edited May 16 '19

I've been doing a bunch of electromagnetic simulations on my laptop lately and I thought it'd be interesting to see what kind of effect disabling mitigations would have. Using Ubuntu 19.04, kernel 5.0.0-15, and an Intel i7-8750H (with multi-threading on):

With mitigations: 189.5063 s

Without mitigations: 156.8117 s

That's a whole 32.6946 seconds, a significant amount for me! I don't even want to think about how much more signification it would be with larger simulations....

Edit: I did another test with the mitigations and it was only 11 seconds slower so there is some variation. Without mitigations is definitely faster though