On Thu, 11 Jan 2018 10:36:16 +1000 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi folks,

Reading https://medium.com/implodinggradients/meltdown-c24a9d5e254e prompts me to ask: are speed.python.org benchmark results produced now actually going to be comparable with those executed last year?

Or will the old results need to be backfilled again with the new baseline OS performance?

AFAIU the Meltdown patches will only significantly affect workloads that do a lot of system calls. *Ideally* our benchmark suite doesn't, since it's meant to benchmark Python, not the outside environment :-)

Spectre seems to be more uncertain, as it can affect any code (userspace code as well as kernel code), and will apparently require careful auditing of sensitive routines to avoid potential information leaks. This all depends which particular routines (e.g. something in glibc) get patched.

In any case we can only tell with actual numbers :-)

Regards

Antoine.