The Downfall Mitigation Impact For Xeon E-2300 Series On Linux 6.5

AVX user-space workloads haven't tended to be impacted much by the other CPU security vulnerabilities of recent years, so running mitigations=off is quite similar to the "Vulnerable, No microcode" results.

For those making use of Neural Magic's DeepSparse AI software, the inference performance has been impacted by the Downfall mitigations as also seen on the Ice Lake and Cascade Lake server benchmarks from August.

With the affected workloads tested, the Xeon E-2366 server with the updated kernel and microcode was running at around 91% of its prior level of performance. At least for those very concerned about performance loss and not too concerned about the Downfall exposure, booting with mitigations disabled -- either selectively disabling Downfall or using the mitigations=off hammer -- is capable of restoring the prior level of performance in these computationally heavy workloads.