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The Performance Cost Of Spectre/Meltdown/Foreshadow Mitigations On Linux

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31–33 of 33 posts

Re: The Performance Cost Of Spectre/Meltdown/Foreshadow Mitigations On Linux

#31
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of things that have to go the wrong way at once to get to the point where that really matters. The first is that your working set won't fit in the processor caches and has regular cache misses into main memory -- but most of the Epyc line has 64MB of L3 cache. Then the access pattern has to be random rather than sequential, which knocks out a major class of the applications satisfying the first criter…

I don't think you really understand the architecture of the machine. EPYC looks on paper like it has a large L3 cache, but it consists of separate L3 caches per "core complex" of which there are two per die and four dies per package. So what you've actually got is a bunch of redundant 8MB caches, which is not the same thing. Because of the baroque topology, especially when you have two sockets, access to main memory…

> Combined with the small caches it's a total disaster.

I think you know that "total disaster" is pretty much hyperbole.

Re: The Performance Cost Of Spectre/Meltdown/Foreshadow Mitigations On Linux

#32
post #28

Regardless of whether the impact is big or small, you are stuck with it if you need the security. But 5-10% performance impact is completely unacceptable for the cases where you don't care about security (much) such as gaming. Given how hard it is to keep my windows machine from eating my CPU anyway with updates etc while I'm gaming: should people start booting to a special partition with a legacy OS without these mi…

Games are rarely bottlenecked by CPU and they don't do much io, so they are much less affected by the mitigations than server loads.

I suppose. Though, personally, I have to manually toggle the meltdown patch (and reboot windows) to be able to play certain games effectively. One game that I play frequently has a benchmark launcher and it shows a 40% performance hit for the meltdown patch...

Re: The Performance Cost Of Spectre/Meltdown/Foreshadow Mitigations On Linux

#33
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't update your OS Sounds like a good way to remain insecure to all other types of vulnerabilities.

It is, but if you care only about performance, and not security, you don't care.

Let me rephrase: Sounds like a good way to remain insecure to all other types of vulnerabilities, and to never receive any performance improvements.
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