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by ccffpphh 2232 days ago
Is this including SPECTRE, etc. mitigations?
2 comments

Yes default settings. The code we’re talking about is a hand rolled LZF decompressor originally written on the Ryzen 9 (so not intentionally Intel optimized).

Spectre doesn’t make much difference since its not making syscalls.

If you can somehow keep the CPU fed it becomes obvious there is more oomph behind the Intel device. That said how often are you running hand rolled assembly routines?

As an additional datapoint liblzf is faster on the Ryzen. But its limited by pipeline stalls so doesn’t get to take advantage of the extra resources.

Why would anyone enable speculative execution mitigations on a computer used to build software?
Building software with lots of opensource libraries is effectively giving shell access to the authors of those libraries. They can stick whatever they like in those build scripts, and there's so many thousands of them I bet you don't check all of them by hand.

Given that, I'd prefer they had shell access as a low privilege user than be able to read my ssh keys from RAM...

Obviously if you compile software as your regular linux user account like most users, you're already a sitting duck, so might as well throw in a few more vulnerabilities.

Because you’re downloading lots of untrustable source from npm and friends when you are fetching your dependencies.
because it's the default on most operating systems