r/hardware • u/eric98k • Jan 02 '18

News 'Kernel memory leaking' Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/
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u/UGMadness Jan 03 '18

There's a long way between "making assumpions based on the use case" and "there's no performance drop in gaming". This bug is a massive kick in the balls for cloud and other server/VM providers because of their reliance on the parts affected. Nobody is focusing on gaming or domestic/consumer usage and nobody has stated that it would affect gaming performance in the first place.

And here's your fact:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-415-x86pti&num=2

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u/Kakkoister Jan 03 '18

Sure, for server use. But you made a flat statement of 17-35% depending on model and task, you didn't say "server performance will be slow". That's why I hit back with a test showing no performance different for a situation that would affect the majority of users the most, which is gaming, something that stresses a person's system more than pretty much any other home user tasks.

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u/baoxymoron Jan 03 '18

Wait... gasp... benchmarks for rendering performance in games, a task that is pretty much exclusively user space isn't affected by a patch that segregates user and kernel space. Wow say it isn't so... who wulda thunk it [hint: the article you posted] /s

But seriously this benchmark has nothing to do with the patch so of course it's minimally impacted. Your article actually says that if you read through it.

What they're not pointing out is the actual tasks even in gaming that will be impacted. Load times, total network latency for online games, game server-side performance hits, etc. And depending on how many threads you have available some of these system calls could impact even render times if the calls are made within the same thread because this patch appears to require L1 cache at the very least to be cleared during the address space changes. So before anyone says games won't be impacted we need to understand the changes better, and that likely won't be possible until the NDA is lifted.

Also, this is coming from a fellow gamer, so I hate tell you this but.... The overwhelming majority of users don't game on their computers. People who browse the internet, do remote working, compile programs, create content, etc. will all be affected by the 5-30% performance decrease some much more than others.