You will find many clients asking how to disable, for example, the Linux patch. Linux is releasing with a flag to disable it, so there is some merit. Why would you want that? There are a lot of times you trust everything running on your box and don't need to take the perf hit.
Intel (and possibly other archs/families) found a perf win that ends up having security implications. A perf nonetheless. If you're willing to bet on your userspace not reading kernel pages, does Intel have a feature for you!
> There are a lot of times you trust everything running on your box and don't need to take the perf hit.
This is true.
> Intel (and possibly other archs/families) found a perf win that ends up having security implications. A perf nonetheless. If you're willing to bet on your userspace not reading kernel pages, does Intel have a feature for you!
This I'm more skeptical of. My best guess is that this is something that saves nanoseconds, but the mitigation is massively more expensive than simply not having the feature.
> Intel found a perf win that ends up having security implications.
Every Intel CPU has a lower perf than you will find on current benchmarks, but yes, there's a perf enhancement that will make the chip as fast as expected, but has security implications.
Intel is certainly entitled to make and promulgate an objective assessment of the impact of the problem, but a problem is still a problem even if it doesn't affect everyone.
The issue is embargoed, but that's, as usual, not keeping everyone from speculating. That's fine too, but also realize the layman (even people in this thread) is getting pummeled with ideas like "my new laptop is going to be 30% slower tomorrow; WTF!!!"
Not me. My comments are restricted to certain things Intel did choose to say.
And as you are concerned about rumor and disinformation, I cannot imagine you are pleased with Intel's insinuation that AMD processors are also affected.
UPDATE: It seems AMD may be being misleading in this case...
You will find many clients asking how to disable, for example, the Linux patch. Linux is releasing with a flag to disable it, so there is some merit. Why would you want that? There are a lot of times you trust everything running on your box and don't need to take the perf hit.
Intel (and possibly other archs/families) found a perf win that ends up having security implications. A perf nonetheless. If you're willing to bet on your userspace not reading kernel pages, does Intel have a feature for you!