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

Code compilation speed benefits by a small amount when these mitigations were disabled.

When disabling Spectre/Meltdown protection, the PostgreSQL read performance on the Core i9 7980XE box improved by 19%.

The GIMP open-source Photoshop alternative program is one of the applications affected a small amount by these mitigations.

The context switching overhead from these protections is easily shown by the Stress-NG kernel benchmark.