The Current Spectre / Meltdown Mitigation Overhead Benchmarks On Linux 5.0

The PostgreSQL performance from Spectre/Meltdown mitigations isn't as severe as we saw on earlier kernels last year, but it's still measurable on the Intel side.

The GIMP image manipulation program is another one of the applicable real-world tests slowed down by these mitigations.

The GNU Octave program that's an alternative to MATLAB also sees a small performance hit on the Intel side from these mitigations.

The ctx-clock micro-benchmark measuring the time to perform a context switch shows the impact incurred on the Intel side while the AMD context switching performance went unchanged.