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. 

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

So I presume no action is needed.

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.

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 August 21, 20196 yr by BusheFlyer

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.

On 8/20/2019 at 2:20 PM, BillS511 said:

 

16 hours ago, BillS511 said:

Good app.

 

Which CPU do you have? What was the increase in FPS?

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

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 August 21, 20196 yr by rjfry

@Tomaz Drnovsek CPU is i7 6700K. As for performance impact can't really tell. Otherwise performance now is good.

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

There is no reason to do this.  CPU side-channel vulnerability mitigations do not adversely affect gaming/sim performance in any meaningful fashion.  This only matters if you're running I/O bound workloads, such as database software.

Here's the proof:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-performance-meltdown-spectre-intel-amd,5457.html

https://www.techspot.com/review/1659-intel-spectre-variant-4-performance-test/

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-does-patching-cpu-security-flaws-impact-gaming-performance

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13659/analyzing-core-i9-9900k-performance-with-spectre-and-meltdown-hardware-mitigations

20 hours ago, TechguyMaxC said:

There is no reason to do this.  CPU side-channel vulnerability mitigations do not adversely affect gaming/sim performance in any meaningful fashion.  This only matters if you're running I/O bound workloads, such as database software.

Here's the proof:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-performance-meltdown-spectre-intel-amd,5457.html

https://www.techspot.com/review/1659-intel-spectre-variant-4-performance-test/

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-does-patching-cpu-security-flaws-impact-gaming-performance

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13659/analyzing-core-i9-9900k-performance-with-spectre-and-meltdown-hardware-mitigations

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.

Ditto with my 4790k.

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 August 22, 20196 yr by vortex681

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.