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BusheFlyer

Spectre and Meltdown related to P3D hardware.

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Removing a security patch comes with a risk AV may not protect you, the industry was forced to patch spectre in march, one such risk is someone get in and uses your pc to mine bitcoin warnings have been put out on this it runs as a Service Host in your task manger slowing your PC. 


 

Raymond Fry.

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I ran the tool on my 6700k and it said all patched and performance "good".

So I presume no action is needed.


Intel i7 6700K @4.3. 32gb Gskill 3200 RAM. Z170x Gigabyte m/b. 28" LG HD monitor. Win 10 Home. 500g Samsung 960 as Windows home. 1 Gb Mushkin SSD for P3D. GTX 1080 8gb.

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13 hours ago, rjfry said:

Spectre and Meltdown was patched by Microsoft 5 months ago.

Yes, this tool is designed to disable those patches due to the associated performance loss with them particularly with older CPU's.

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4 minutes ago, IanHarrison said:

I ran the tool on my 6700k and it said all patched and performance "good".

So I presume no action is needed.

You can try toggling off the patches and then running p3d like a before and after and see if you get any difference or not. It does sound as though the performance hit for your CPU might well be negligible and therefore not worth turning off. For my Xeon it's pretty dramatic.

Edited by BusheFlyer

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No discernable effect at all.

Either I am lucky and my rig is unaffected or the program failed to work.

In either event I'm leaving things as they are.


Intel i7 6700K @4.3. 32gb Gskill 3200 RAM. Z170x Gigabyte m/b. 28" LG HD monitor. Win 10 Home. 500g Samsung 960 as Windows home. 1 Gb Mushkin SSD for P3D. GTX 1080 8gb.

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It would be interesting to know which cpus are concerned. Is the a list around somewhere?


- Harry 

i9-13900K (HT off, 5.5 GHz, Z690) - 32 GB RAM (DDR5 6400, CAS 34), RTX 3090Windows 11 Pro (1TB M.2) - MSFS 2020 (MS Store, on separate 4TB M.2).

 

 

 

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In the hardware CPU forum on Avsim in march a thread was all about this Intel and Microsoft realised a patch and it did not impact as some people thought.

In fact just do some checking on the web we are talking 2018 January when Spectre and Meltdown was found so if your PC is running OK no worry's, even the MB manufactures released BIOS updates.   

Edited by rjfry

 

Raymond Fry.

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8 hours ago, Tomaz Drnovsek said:

Would you recommend this for 4790k?

I updated my 4790K to the Meltdown and Spectre mitigations and noticed a 4%-5% decrease in performance in benchmarks.  Not sure that loss of performance was even detectable in the P3Dv4 at the time.  Last summer I used Inspectre to disable both mitigations in the 4790K (to regain the lost performance) but still didn't perceive a change in the sim.  Either way, the 4790K just did a fine job!

HTH,

Greg

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20 hours ago, TechguyMaxC said:

There is every reason to do this IF you use older CPU architecture. Not a single one of those articles is relevant to Intel processors prior to 8th generation as I mentioned in the initial post. Case in point, my Xeon x5670.. I see between 10-20% and even arguably 30% performance drop measured in FPS in P3D with Spectre enabled. That is a pretty convincing reason in my opinion.

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Ditto with my 4790k.


Gigabyte x670 Aorus Elite AX MB; AMD 7800X3D CPU; Deepcool LT520 AIO Cooler; 64 Gb G.Skill Trident Z5 NEO DDR5 6000; Win11 Pro; P3D V5.4; 1 Samsung 990 2Tb NVMe SSD: 1 Crucial 4Tb MX500 SATA SSD; 1 Samsung 860 1Tb SSD; Gigabyte Aorus Extreme 1080ti 11Gb VRAM; Toshiba 43" LED TV @ 4k; Honeycomb Bravo.

 

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Whilst I'm in no way trying to downplay the threat from these exploits, there are a few things to consider. As far as I'm aware, there have been no documented examples of Spectre or Meltdown attacks in the wild, just a number of proof-of-concept examples. To quote two reliable websites:

Meltdown and Spectre must be run locally on the machine and must be loaded through some form of application. Therefore, it’s not easy to do this via a “drive by attack” that does not launch a machine-specific application targeted at this vulnerability.

Don't think of this as the next big tool to exploit ransomware or regular malware, because it doesn't go like that. A side-channel attack is time consuming and it requires hours to pluck information from the CPU. But for a state-sponsored threat actor, targeting a high profile organisation, this thing is gold.

and this from Virus Bulletin about Spectre, in particular:

Unfortunately, the subtle difference between a sample, or a PoC (proof of concept), and a piece of malware went unnoticed (except by AV experts) and led to major confusion with claims that 'Meltdown-Spectre malware' was in the wild. We re-iterate that there is a significant difference between a PoC of Spectre and a piece of malware using Spectre. Turning a PoC into a malicious executable is far from a trivial process.

So for the average home user, because both of these exploits need local access, the chances of being affected by them are extremely small - plus, it's just not worth the time and effort required. The main reason the Intel and Microsoft did what they did was because of the potential litigation from large organisations or governments if attacks were to materialize. Should you apply the patches? Probably. Are you likely to be affected if you don't? Probably not.

Edited by vortex681
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 i7-6700k | Asus Maximus VIII Hero | 16GB RAM | MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X Plus | Samsung Evo 500GB & 1TB | WD Blue 2 x 1TB | EVGA Supernova G2 850W | AOC 2560x1440 monitor | Win 10 Pro 64-bit

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On 8/22/2019 at 9:00 AM, BusheFlyer said:

There is every reason to do this IF you use older CPU architecture. Not a single one of those articles is relevant to Intel processors prior to 8th generation as I mentioned in the initial post. Case in point, my Xeon x5670.. I see between 10-20% and even arguably 30% performance drop measured in FPS in P3D with Spectre enabled. That is a pretty convincing reason in my opinion.

You're complaining about performance drop on a CPU that was released in March 2010.  That's almost 10 years old.  Well outside the average or even expected lifecycle.  

In such an extreme circumstance you really can't be speaking for anyone but yourself.  The majority of users here are at least on Haswell, which admittedly sees more performance reduction from side-channel vulnerability mitigations than post-Haswell products, but nothing like what you're talking about.  

I don't see how this is helpful to anyone.  You can say there aren't any proven exploits in the wild, but that can change in an instant.  It is simply bad advice.  If you want to run 10 year old hardware and turn off protection against what is potentially the biggest vulnerability in the modern era of computing, that's your choice.  I suggest no one else do the same.  

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