Benchmarking Clear Linux With KPTI + Retpoline Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 9 January 2018 at 08:39 AM EST. Page 5 of 5. 22 Comments.
Clear Linux KPTI + Retpoline Patches
Clear Linux KPTI + Retpoline Patches
Clear Linux KPTI + Retpoline Patches

Like with our benchmarks on other distributions, Redis performance is notably affected by the KPTI and Retpoline support.

Clear Linux KPTI + Retpoline Patches

The Apache web server performance is also affected.

Those are the results as they stand right now for Intel's Clear Linux distribution when going from no Meltdown/Spectre protection to having the latest Kernel Page Table Isolation and Retpoline support. The impact is roughly in line with what we've been seeing on other Linux distributions where I/O and other high kernel interactivity workloads do see a performance impact, but at least not generally around the 30% figure that some had hyped up these CPU vulnerabilities to having. As these kernel patches continue to mature and see more optimization work on performance, we'll certainly have continued benchmarks on Phoronix.

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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.