That's not a great comparison there.  They've gone from a 2+ year old, somewhat 
customised kernel, and then compared it to a bleeding edge vanilla upstream 
kernel.

It's worth pointing out that Ubuntu has currently opted to only put in Meltdown 
patches with the kernel they released yesterday.  Spectre stuff is still to 
come. (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/SpectreAndMeltdown 
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/SpectreAndMeltdown>) so 
that benchmark probably won't reflect what anyone actually sees anyway.

Impact is going to be very variable based on what is being benchmarked.  I've 
been doing a whole bunch of benchmarking at work as part of some broad 
investigations of the impact for our customers, leveraging a few different 
resources.
I haven't grabbed and run the speed.python.org <http://speed.python.org/> 
benchmarks but I may be able to spin up a bare metal CentOS instance tomorrow 
and run through the paces with a pre/post Spectre and Meltdown patched kernel, 
if it's straightforward to do. (are there any documents people could point me 
to with instructions?)

I'd consider the patches here to largely invalidate any historical performance 
benchmarks for a comparison perspective.  Even on a CPU with PCID capabilities 
there is definitely a hit on certain types of operations.

We're also very much in the "patch to make it secure" phase, with an 
optimisation phase still to come, and it's not certain what Intel, AMD, and/or 
ARM are going to push out by way of updates that may mitigate the impact.  
There's going to be a lot of focus on improving the performance situation over 
the next while, so the odds are reasonable that full historical benchmarks will 
need to be run repeatedly, I guess?

Paul

 
On January 11, 2018 12:36:16 AM UTC, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi folks,

Reading https://medium.com/implodinggradients/meltdown-c24a9d5e254e 
<https://medium.com/implodinggradients/meltdown-c24a9d5e254e>
prompts me to ask: are speed.python.org benchmark results produced now
actually going to be comparable with those executed last year?

Or will the old results need to be backfilled again with the new
baseline OS performance?

Cheers,
Nick.
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