Debian Systems Now Patched Against "Downfall" and "INCEPTION" CPU Flaws

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Debian Systems Now Patched Against "Downfall" and "INCEPTION" CPU Flaws - 9to5Linux
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Any observed impact to performance?

It's anticipated to slow things down unfortunately

Seems like a lot of these "performance enhancing features" simply ignored security principles or tried to sidestep them, only for the features to introduce glaring security hole in the overall ISA, forcing people to then sidestep the supposed performance features so that it never mattered to begin with.

Are Intel, AMD and others pulling a fast one on us for the sake of gaining positive benchmarks?

If they were held liable, CPU manufacturers wouldn't use these crappy hacks to increase performance, which helps their bottom line. Now I'm a cynic, so I'll say that they might've done this on purpose.

According to amd only epic cpus benefit from the standalone microcode update. All others need an updated bios with the new microcode. Zen 1 and zen 2 don't need microcode updates. Also having the new microcode doesn't mitigate the vulernability on its own as far as I can tell, the kernel needs to be the one doing the mitigation.