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by starspangled 405 days ago
mitigations=off disables workarounds for bugs or "mis-features" in the CPU that could be exploited to bypass OS security measures.

smap is an OS security measure, and so does not get disabled by mitigations=off. smap can be pretty draining for certain IO performance though. IMO it should be more well-known or covered by a more obvious option.

Linux kernel developers are really bad at defining and naming options like this.