Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 6 Dec 2019 15:51:04 +1030
From:      "O'Connor, Daniel" <darius@dons.net.au>
To:        freebsd-stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Disabling speculative execution mitigations
Message-ID:  <C19DE24E-22CB-4E55-95CE-0A07FC8A23F5@dons.net.au>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi,
I am trying to track down a performance drop with the ASPEED xorg video =
driver between FreeBSD 11 and 12 (I'm not expecting miracles from it but =
it was basically unusable..)

I wondered if some of the speculative execution mitigations could be =
causing the problem so I did some digging and found these..

vm.pmap.pti=3D"0"        # Disable page table isolation
hw.ibrs_disable=3D"1"    # Disable Indirect Branch Restricted =
Speculation
hw.mds_disable=3D"0"     # Disable Microarchitectural Data Sampling =
flush
hw.vmm.vmx=3D"1"         # Don't flush RSB on vmexit (presumably only =
affects bhyve etc)
hw.lazy_fpu_switch=3D"1" # Lazily flush FPU

Does anyone know of any others?

I have 2 systems with the same motherboard (Supermicro X11SSH-F), one is =
older and runs FreeBSD 11 (and had an older BIOS_ and the newer runs =
FreeBSD 12.

FWIW on FreeBSD 11 the performance (measured by a subset of x11perf =
benchmarks) went down 40% after updating to the latest BIOS (2.2a). =
Unfortunately on FreeBSD 12 rolling back to the original BIOS (2.2) did =
not improve performance.

--
Daniel O'Connor
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
 -- Andrew Tanenbaum





Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?C19DE24E-22CB-4E55-95CE-0A07FC8A23F5>