Phoronix takes a look at the performance impact of Zombieload Variant Two on Intel's Cascade Lake platform

Zombieload V2 TAA Performance Impact Benchmarks On Cascade Lake

While this week we have posted a number of benchmarks on the JCC Erratum and its CPU microcode workaround that introduces new possible performance hits, also being announced this week as part of Intel's security disclosures was "Zombieload Variant Two" as the TSX Async Abort vulnerability that received same-day Linux kernel mitigations. I've been benchmarking the TAA mitigations to the Linux kernel since the moment they hit the public Git tree and here are those initial benchmark results on an Intel Cascade Lake server.

While Intel's latest-generation Cascade Lake server processors have hardware protections against other MDS vulnerabilities like RIDL and Fallout, they require software mitigations for Zombieload V2 / TAA. Researchers had disclosed this Zombieload variant back to Intel earlier in the year but was placed under an extended embargo and not revealed back during the original May disclosures.

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