This update aims to eliminate the “hole”. But it also caused performance degradation in certain scenarios.
The crash vulnerability affects software that actively uses AVX2/AVX-512 GATHER instructions.
Unlike many previous CPU vulnerabilities where performance drops in scenarios with lots of I/O or other interactions between userspace and kernel, the Downfall vulnerability can slow down software running entirely in userspace if enough VGATHER instructions are used.
Intel representatives have reported performance losses of up to 50% in extreme cases. However, tests have shown that in practice the performance losses are less significant but still noticeable.
Source: Ferra
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