Linux 4.15: After the first reactions from the appearance of Meltdown and Specter, the first fixes have arrived. We already know that these patches will slow down our systems, but, at least for Linux, those slowdowns may not be as noticeable as we thought they would be.
Gren Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel developer, said the latest Linux kernel, 4.15 is 7-9% faster than the 30 version of 2017 released in 4,17, 2017 version of XNUMX.
These are the good news. The bad news is that, with KPTI (Kernel page-table isolation), version 4.14 is 1- to 2% slower than 4.11.
However, as Kroah-Hartman pointed out:
"So we're right back where we started, which makes me feel good, since the recent changes brought by Meltdown aren't really that much problem".
Of course, "developers who have worked so hard to achieve this 7-9 percent increase over the past year may not be so happy."
Meanwhile, at Phoronix, a Linux benchmarking website, Michael Larabel, owner and developer, found - in a recent test of the Linux Kernels (Linux 4.0 to 4.15) - that while there are "some downtime when using Linux 4.15 Kernels… at least in some of the benchmarks, performance from Linux 4.15 is not at the lowest levels we have seen in the benchmarks of these versions over the last three years. "
Kroah-Hartman concluded that "if you are using an older version of the Kernel (ie one of 3.10.y, 4.4.y or 4.9.y), this is a completely different story."
"Change to a newer version and compare!"
Here we should add, that regardless of the performance improvement, the vulnerabilities Meltdown and Specter should be patched.
Meltdown and Specter: They will happen again… and again
Let us mention, however, that Intel should also be more aware… so that the developers of every operating system that is released do not pay for it.
