How Do Spectre/Meltdown Fixes Affect The Linux Kernel? (phoronix.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday September 1, 2018 @08:04AM from the benchmarking-bugs dept.

"Using the newly minted Linux 4.19 feature code, fresh benchmarks were carried out looking at the performance cost of Spectre/Meltdown/Foreshadow mitigations on Intel Xeon v. AMD EPYC CPUs," writes an anonymous Slashdot reader: Workloads affected by these CPU vulnerabilities mainly deal with I/O and frequent kernel calls while CPU bound tests are still found to be minimally impacted. When toggling these mitigations on Linux 4.19, Intel Xeon CPUs were found to be 10~15% slower with the default kernel while AMD EPYC CPUs dropped to about 5% slower.

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As expected by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 08:10 · Score: 0, Troll

It is not a slowdown, it is removing an undue [broken/illegal/dangerous] speedup ;-)
You can, of course, disable the mitigation. Just don't do it on anything processing external network packets, etc.