Canonical to Remove GPU Exploit Mitigation to Gain 20% Performance Boost
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Typically open source operating systems work to close off avenues for potential bugs and exploits, but sometimes, in the quest for convenience or performance, security takes a lower priority. We see an example of this in Canonical disabling a vulnerability mitigation for Intel GPUs in order to gain a 20% performance boost. The issue report on Launchpad states: "After discussion between Intel and Canonical's security teams, we are in agreement that Spectre no longer needs to be mitigated for the GPU at the Compute Runtime level.
At this point, Spectre has been mitigated in the kernel, and a clear warning from the Compute Runtime build serves as a notification for those running modified kernels without those patches. For these reasons, we feel that Spectre mitigations in Compute Runtime no longer offer enough security impact to justify the current performance trade-off."
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