NetBSD 8.1 RC1 Released With MDS Mitigations, Option To Turn Off SMT/HT, Driver Updates

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NetBSD 8.1 RC1 Released With MDS Mitigations, Option To Turn Off SMT/HT, Driver Updates

The first and only anticipated release candidate for NetBSD 8.1 is now available for testing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NetBSD-8.1-RC1-Released

[andyprough]

I turned off hyperthreading in the BIOS on my i3 laptop a few days ago, haven't noticed any difference at all yet.

[Guest]

I turned off hyperthreading in the BIOS on my i3 laptop a few days ago, haven't noticed any difference at all yet.

This will mostly depend on your workload. It seems that HT is generally a win with multi-threaded loads these days. I prefer to disable threads (in Linux) as my computer runs, because that way I don't need to reboot, and I assume the majority of the security gain is there. Since we're talking about Intel chips, I still doubt that they're remotely secure, at best they feel like so to the general public. Who knows what black hats managed to stir up these days with plenty of PoCs and lots of possibilities to abuse design mistakes.

[c117152]

I turned off hyperthreading in the BIOS on my i3 laptop a few days ago, haven't noticed any difference at all yet.

I had firefox build time double over disabling hyperthreading on a soft raid setup. Had to switch to hard raid and it still took a big hit.

[andyprough]

I had firefox build time double over disabling hyperthreading on a soft raid setup. Had to switch to hard raid and it still took a big hit.

Are you building Nightly? I've noticed that from one build to the next can be extraordinarily different in terms of length of time to build.

[c117152]

Are you building Nightly? I've noticed that from one build to the next can be extraordinarily different in terms of length of time to build.

Same version between build attempts.