Ubuntu Disables Spectre/Meltdown Protections
Schneier on Security
JULY 2, 2025
A whole class of speculative execution attacks against CPUs were published in 2018. They seemed pretty catastrophic at the time. But the fixes were as well. Speculative execution was a way to speed up CPUs, and removing those enhancements resulted in significant performance drops. Now, people are rethinking the trade-off. Ubuntu has disabled some protections, resulting in 20% performance boost.
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