The Spectre/Meltdown Performance Impact On Linux 4.20, Decimating Benchmarks With New STIBP Overhead

As outlined yesterday, significant slowdowns with the Linux 4.20 kernel turned out to be due to the addition of the kernel-side bits for STIBP (Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors) for cross-HyperThread Spectre Variant Two mitigation. This has incurred significant performance penalties with the STIBP support in its current state with Linux 4.20 Git and is enabled by default at least for Intel systems with up-to-date microcode. Here are some follow-up benchmarks looking at the performance hit with the Linux 4.20 development kernel as well as the overall Spectre and Meltdown mitigation impact on this latest version of the Linux kernel. Some users have said AMD also needs STIBP, but at least with Linux 4.20 Git and the AMD systems I have tested with their up-to-date BIOS/microcode, that hasn't appeared to be the case. Most of the AMD STIBP references date back to January when Spectre/Meltdown first came to light. We'll see in the week ahead if there is any comment from AMD but at this time seems to be affecting up-to-date Intel systems with the Linux 4.20 kernel.

Today in Techrights

• The European Patent Office Comes up With a Plethora of New Buzzwords by Which to Refer to Software Patents
• Patent Maximalists in Europe Keep Mentioning China Even Though It Barely Matters to European Patents
• Team UPC Has Been Reduced to Lies, Lies, and More Lies about the Unified Patent Court Agreement
• Links 17/11/2018: Mesa 18.3 RC3, Total War: WARHAMMER II, GNOME 3.31.2
• Links 16/11/2018: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta, Mesa 18.2.5, VirtualBox 6.0 Beta 2

today's leftovers

• macOS vs.Windows: Which OS Really Is the Best?

  If you’re truly gung-ho on interface customization, I recommend Linux, which offers a selection of completely different user interface shells. [...] Those looking for the ultimate in stability, though, should check out Linux.

• Essential System Tools: Nmap – network security tool

  This is the ninth in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For this article, we’ll look at Nmap (“Network Mapper”).

 

• KDE Itinerary @ Paris Open Transport Meetup

  I have been invited by Kisio Digital to present the work we have been doing around KDE Itinerary at the Paris Open Transport Meetup next week. The meetup is near Gare de Lyon and starts on Thursday at 19:00. Feel free to come by, I’m looking forward to discuss ideas on how to move KDE Itinerary forward.

• WordPress Update 5.0 Introduces The Gutenberg Editor, A Brand New Theme and Much More

  WordPress, an open source platform for managing content which is built up and based around MySQL and PHP. Often used for blogging purposes and publishing content on websites, WordPress happens to be one of the pioneer class in what it does. With that, building up on its current platform, the latest update for is arriving sooner than later. The 5.0 update, dubbed as the biggest update in quite a while. While minor updates will be followed and coupled with the main deal, WordPress developers and publishers have been keen to reiterate the two new additions brought towards it, this time around. Firstly they emphasis on the Gutenberg Editor, a new way to edit text rather than the usual classic WordPress Editor that people normally use. The second one happens to be the theme for the updates platform. Dubbed as the Twenty Nineteen theme, this will be the style suite enveloping the WordPress user interface this time around. Firstly, Gutenberg. This is not a new feature for those ‘Pro’ WordPress users who may have seen the update as a form of the testing phase in the update version 4.9.8. It allowed for users to try out this new form of the text editing platform. The look of the entire editor window seems ot be revamped and can be seen here below. Apart from that, interacting with it has been changed, the true depth of which would be completely known when the full version is available to the end users and is tested out.

• Microsoft and Facebook team up on open-source AI [Ed:Two surveillance companies are openwashing their abuses, plan to blame the abuses on "AI"]

• SRT Alliance Welcomes Comcast Technology Solutions and Ooyala to Open Source Video Streaming Project

• How to Configure Nginx as Reverse Proxy for Nodejs App

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