Re: LIC MITIGATE SPECTRE AND MELTDOWN VULNERABILITY

I have concerns around potential performance impacts.

I recall reading that intel workloads expected anywhere from 5% to 30% "overhead" after installing the fixes.

I do not see anything on the IBM i PTF that mentions any performance implications.

the firmware fix mentions:

<snip>
Clients should review these patches in the context of their datacenter environment and standard evaluation practices to determine if they should be applied.

Remediation will likely come from two sources - firmware updates from hardware vendors and software updates from application vendors. Software updates will be in the form of operating system patches as well as potentially from applications themselves.

These patches may have a performance degradation due to the nature of the fixes. The degradation will vary depending on the workload and environment of each system. For example, a system in a text-based environment, running minimal software, performing purely memory based calculations might not show a large performance hit. On the other hand, a system with a GUI, primarily used as an information repository with a lot of disk and network activity, may see a larger drop in performance. We suggest applying the patches in a test environment to get a better idea of what level of performance you can expect when the patches are applied to your production environment.
</snip>





Rob Berendt wrote on 1/11/2018 7:29 AM:

Already put the new firmware on three Power 8's. Did that yesterday. It
was concurrent. No disruption to the users. One Power 8 got a message
that a special update needed to be done to a vios lpar. And I could
either jump through hoops while riding a unicycle and churning butter or
just wait until the next reboot of vios.
Odd. They all run the same version of VIOS.


Rob Berendt