Intel CPU, Hyper-Threading and Spectre STIBP mitigation

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I was reading phoronix 0 and phoronix 1 articles on STIBP mitigation impact on CPU performance, since I run a pretty old laptop equiped with a Sandy Bridge CPU I figured that I should do my own tests to see how bad things really are or aren’t.

CPU: Intel Core i3-2310M - 2 cores / 4 threads
Motherboard: Lenovo Thinkpad
RAM: 2x4 GB DDR3 @1333 MHz
HDD: Plextor M5pro

OS: Fedora 29 x86_64 with stock kernels

My benchmark of choice is compiling the Linux kernel (version 4.19.2).
What I do is download the kernel version to /dev/shm ramdisk and compile it using the defconfig configuration while checking how many seconds it takes to complete the task.

Meltdown on nagg.eu

Intel CPU, Hyper-Threading and Spectre STIBP mitigation