Initial Benchmarks Of The Spectre "SWAPGS" Mitigation Performance Impact

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Initial Benchmarks Of The Spectre "SWAPGS" Mitigation Performance Impact

Yesterday the SWAPGS vulnerability was made public as a new variant of Spectre V1 that affects all operating systems and is believed to affect only Intel CPUs. The SWAPGS discovery by Bitdefender was quietly mitigated by Microsoft for Windows 10 last month while yesterday the patches were posted for the mainline Linux kernel as the Grand Schemozzle. As soon as learning of this SWAPGS vulnerability and seeing the kernel code, I began running some preliminary performance tests to look at the impact of this latest CPU mitigation.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=28131

[Azrael5]

Another vulnerability called SwapGs discovered by Bitdefender programmers affects Intel CPUs since 2012. Intel is a VIRUS.

[boxie]

I do wonder how many more of these things exist

[skeevy420]

Another vulnerability called SwapGs discovered by Bitdefender programmers affect Intel CPUs since 2012. Intel is a VIRUS.

I'm glad I have 2010 Intels.

My shit's so old it's damn-near invulnerable and almost safe to use 100% unmitigated. Westmere Xeons FTW

[skeevy420]

I do wonder how many more of these things exist

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[bug77]

I do wonder how many more of these things exist

Considering we're looking a new attack vector that has existed for years, but nobody thought it could be exploited as such, quite a lot, I expect.
The only saving grace is they're damn near impossible to exploit by themselves.

[Guest]

I'm glad I have 2010 Intels.

My shit's so old it's damn-near invulnerable and almost safe to use 100% unmitigated. Westmere Xeons FTW

Every chip since the Pentium Pro is vulnerable to spectre.

[skeevy420]

Every chip since the Pentium Pro is vulnerable to spectre.

That's why I said "damn-near" and "almost"

[schmidtbag]

I'm glad I have 2010 Intels.

My shit's so old it's damn-near invulnerable and almost safe to use 100% unmitigated. Westmere Xeons FTW

I'm not sure if you're joking or not. Westmere shares many of the same vulnerabilities; the difference is Intel has no intention on updating the microcode (which means you are actually less safe).

[skeevy420]

I'm not sure if you're joking or not. Westmere shares many of the same vulnerabilities; the difference is Intel has no intention on updating the microcode (which means you are actually less safe).

Both. Some we have, some we don't, some have been fixed, some won't be fixed.

It's dumb to run unmitigated outside of benchmarks.