Zombieload V2 TAA Performance Impact Benchmarks On Cascade Lake

Under I/O workloads it was easy to clock in a slowdown now when the TAA mitigations are active, which on patched kernels is done by default assuming Intel TSX is present and belongs to an Intel CPU generation requiring these mitigations.

In various CPU bound workloads the impact of the TAA mitigation ranged from barely measurable to a couple percent.

But in some workloads like GraphicsMagick image manipulation the TAA mitigation did present a noticeable difference. Disabling TSX generally yielded comparable performance to running with TSX enabled and force disabling the new Zombieload V2 mitigation.