News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Spectre mitigations murder userspace performance by FunnyLookinHat on Saturday June 19, 2021 @11:06AM (#27561063)
Yeah no disagreement there. I had totally forgotten about the JS POC - ugh!

The JavaScript argument is interesting to me in that it's already flawed. I suppose I'd rather focus on the security issues with browsers running code on my computer more than anything else since it's effectively the "but what about ___" answer to so many threads like this one.

I've seen a few other comments suggesting per-process rules to enable or disable branch protections. That's an interesting thought, especially considering you could apply it to either "trusted" or "untrusted" code depending on it's source.

Re:Spectre mitigations murder userspace performance by fiddlerwoaroof on Saturday June 19, 2021 @12:57PM (#27562148)
With Arm big.little architectures, it could start making sense to have dedicated in-order cores for running JavaScript and other “untrusted” code.

Also, I wonder if disabling mitigations on the desktop and running the browser in a VM with mitigations enabled would be effective.

Re:Spectre mitigations murder userspace performance by saagarjha on Saturday June 19, 2021 @02:34PM (#27563074)
People want their websites to load fast, though.