Is it safe to turn off Metldown and Spectre security?

[undercooked spaghetti]

Hi all, i was facing stutter in cities/populated areas in Red dead redemption 2 despite of stable FPS (65-75). I tried every fix i found online but none of them worked. Lastly, I was told to turn off Meltdown and Spectre security to see if it helps. I did and it fixed my problem but it leaves the Computer vulnerable. Someone mentioned that it is completely safe since this got patched but I will want to be sure if it is safe or not. Something i have come up with is to turn it off while playing RDR2 and turn it back on after i'm done playing but it seems like a hassle doing it every time i want to play that game. Note: RDR2 is the only game that is problematic. I'll list my specs below:

 

i7-4790 cooled by Cooler Master MA410p

16GB DDR3 1600mhz (4x4)

MSI Gaming X GTX 1070 8GB

240GB Gigabyte SSD (boot)

2TB WD HDD (Games)

[Bombastinator]

It got mitigated.  It’s unpatchable.  I know people (all IT pros) who were bugged so much by specter/meltdown they flat out quit using x86 entirely and went arm.  I would have done it too but I like video games too much. (I’m a weak weak man) I won’t be turning it off ever myself.

[JoostinOnline]

It's not really "safe", but it's not awful either. Your chances of getting attacked a pretty low. The vast majority of people never even got a patch for it. I'm surprised you did. I have a 4790k and my Z97 motherboard manufacturer never issued a fix.

[Bombastinator]

5 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

It's not really "safe", but it's not awful either. Your chances of getting attacked a pretty low. The vast majority of people never even got a patch for it. I'm surprised you did. I have a 4790k and my Z97 motherboard manufacturer never issued a fix.

Microsoft and intel did.  It eats a bunch of cpu capacity.  Giant pile of suxor.  Even new x86 stuff is still vulnerable.  Less vulnerable because they’ve got hardware mitigation as well, but it’s still only mitigation.

[Teddy07]

I would not worry about it as a consumer. I didnˋt even bother to update the bios with a patch. 

[5x5]

Considering how extremely easy they are to execute, I'd say it's a very large risk. All it takes is one infected web page and you're fucked. There's a very good reason why the patches got rushed and all other development was paused

[5x5]

21 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

It's not really "safe", but it's not awful either. Your chances of getting attacked a pretty low. The vast majority of people never even got a patch for it. I'm surprised you did. I have a 4790k and my Z97 motherboard manufacturer never issued a fix.

You received a fix whether you like it or not through Windows update. It's impossible to update the OS without the fix

[SolarNova]

While it is a massive security concern for experts in the field and ofc intelligence organizations and country wide security systems etc, for the average consumer its a non issue. It is highly unlikely u will ever suffer from it unless u frequent dodgy sites and download 'dodgy' files. So if ur system runs better without the 'patch' , so be it.

[Bombastinator]

14 minutes ago, SolarNova said:

While it is a massive security concern for experts in the field and ofc intelligence organizations and country wide security systems etc, for the average consumer its a non issue. It is highly unlikely u will ever suffer from it unless u frequent dodgy sites and download 'dodgy' files. So if ur system runs better without the 'patch' , so be it.

Non issue might be strong.  My reaction has been to not do anything vaguely important that involves finances or personal information on an x86 machine at all since it was discovered.  PCs are for video games and watching movies for me now.

[5x5]

51 minutes ago, SolarNova said:

While it is a massive security concern for experts in the field and ofc intelligence organizations and country wide security systems etc, for the average consumer its a non issue. It is highly unlikely u will ever suffer from it unless u frequent dodgy sites and download 'dodgy' files. So if ur system runs better without the 'patch' , so be it.

That's a massive overstatement. It's extremely easy to defraud someone using the exploits. All you need is a legit looking site with an infected script.

[JoostinOnline]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

Microsoft and intel did.  It eats a bunch of cpu capacity.  Giant pile of suxor.  Even new x86 stuff is still vulnerable.  Less vulnerable because they’ve got hardware mitigation as well, but it’s still only mitigation.

 

1 hour ago, 5x5 said:

You received a fix whether you like it or not through Windows update. It's impossible to update the OS without the fix

Oh, I assumed your meant the BIOS updates that were released. It was only available for Skylake and later as I recall.

[5x5]

5 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

 

Oh, I assumed your meant the BIOS updates that were released. It was only available for Skylake and later as I recall.

The patch covers all ibtep CPUs since everything back to core 2 and centrino is affected

[Curious Pineapple]

1 minute ago, 5x5 said:

The patch covers all ibtep CPUs since everything back to core 2 and centrino is affected

Mine got no fix, Intel have a list of CPU's they did and didn't provide mitigations for.

[Bombastinator]

4 hours ago, JoostinOnline said:

 

Oh, I assumed your meant the BIOS updates that were released. It was only available for Skylake and later as I recall.

Skylake is hardware mitigated so it doesn’t take the performance hit the older stuff does.   Mitigation’s were put out though.  At least I’m pretty sure they were.   I’ve got an old intel machine and my understanding was that the software mitigation ate a significant chunk of processor speed on them.  It wasn’t as bad as the 100% fix of simply turning off preemptive multitasking though.   Do that and one of them vanishes.  I forget which one.  Hits your processor really really hard though a lot of ipc is premptive multitasking. 
 

NOTE: As noted below this may be BS.  I did think they started doing hardware mitigation with skylake, partially because they all the intel stuff  is called “skylake plus” of some sort these days.  It may have not started till AFTER skylake, which is kind of a big deal and makes the “skylake plus”claimers kind of wrong.

[5x5]

37 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

Mine got no fix, Intel have a list of CPU's they did and didn't provide mitigations for.

You still received a software mitigation from MS even if Intel neglected to provide a microcode update.

[5x5]

24 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Skylake is hardware mitigated so it doesn’t take the performance hit the older stuff does.   Mitigation’s were put out though.  At least I’m pretty sure they were.   I’ve got an old intel machine and my understanding was that the software mitigation ate a significant chunk of processor speed on them.  It wasn’t as bad as the 100% fix of simply turning off preemptive multitasking though.   Do that and one of them vanishes.  I forget which one.  Hits your processor really really hard though a lot of ipc is premptive multitasking. 

Skylake is NOT hardware mitigated. That's 9th gen.

[JoostinOnline]

26 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Skylake is hardware mitigated so it doesn’t take the performance hit the older stuff does.

That's definitely not true.  It got a microcode update, but at a noticeable performance hit.

[Bombastinator]

56 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

That's definitely not true.  It got a microcode update, but at a noticeable performance hit.

It appears I’m a few generations behind then.  There were several hardware mitigation levels.  Some got hits some didn’t.  I’ve got ivy bridge. It appears I need to learn what I’m stuck with.  I thought it was a 10% performance hit but I’m guessing at this point it’s worse.

 

looks like I was more or less right.  The only benchmarks I can find are for Linux (wtf?) but they seem to be in the 5-15% range depending on task.  AMD is a bit better because they were hit less hard but there are problems.  I don’t know much about AMD mitigation.

 

Intel did software mitigation back to sandy bridge.  Anything older and you gotta turn off preemptive multitasking.  No comment I can find about skylake or later generations. In order to have hardware anything it would have to be designed after the flaws popped.  That was several years ago though. 

[JoostinOnline]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

In order to have hardware anything it would have to be designed after the flaws popped.  That was several years ago though. 

It was only two years ago. The vulnerabilities were made public at the start of 2018, and Intel still hadn't found a fix then despite just launching their 8th generation (Coffee Lake) processors.

 

Anyway, to answer the OP's question, just stay off the web when your software mitigation is disabled.

[BuckGup]

4 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

II know people (all IT pros) who were bugged so much by specter/meltdown they flat out quit using x86 entirely and went arm.  I

I highly highly doubt that statement. 

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, JoostinOnline said:

It was only two years ago. The vulnerabilities were made public at the start of 2018, and Intel still hadn't found a fix then despite just launching their 8th generation (Coffee Lake) processors.

 

Anyway, to answer the OP's question, just stay off the web when your software mitigation is disabled.

Yuck.  No coffee lake or me then.

[Trik'Stari]

5 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

It got mitigated.  It’s unpatchable.  I know people (all IT pros) who were bugged so much by specter/meltdown they flat out quit using x86 entirely and went arm.  I would have done it too but I like video games too much. (I’m a weak weak man) I won’t be turning it off ever myself.

I never turned it off either. No point in turning my 7700k into a 4690k.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, BuckGup said:

I highly highly doubt that statement. 

You want names?  I can give you three off the top of my head.  It’s impolite to name people on the internet though so I won’t.  I can give you one quasi name since it’s a net name and the most famous.  Dude went by Seebs on irc way back when.  He was the most well known.  Another one less well known did one of the first recursive troll sites called “Amish queers on the internet” (since one cant be Amish and queer or on he internet). It’s still around I think.  He third was navy intel and lives about 30 feet away from me.

[5x5]

3 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

It appears I’m a few generations behind then.  There were several hardware mitigation levels.  Some got hits some didn’t.  I’ve got ivy bridge. It appears I need to learn what I’m stuck with.  I thought it was a 10% performance hit but I’m guessing at this point it’s worse.

 

looks like I was more or less right.  The only benchmarks I can find are for Linux (wtf?) but they seem to be in the 5-15% range depending on task.  AMD is a bit better because they were hit less hard but there are problems.  I don’t know much about AMD mitigation.

 

Intel did software mitigation back to sandy bridge.  Anything older and you gotta turn off preemptive multitasking.  No comment I can find about skylake or later generations. In order to have hardware anything it would have to be designed after the flaws popped.  That was several years ago though. 

AMD was mostly unscathed - their performance didn't take any hit since meltdown didn't affect them and spectre only barely affected some AM4 products so them itigation needed was minimal.

[BuckGup]

2 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

You want names?  I can give you three off the top of my head.  It’s impolite to name people on the internet though so I won’t.  I can give you one quasi name since it’s a net name and the most famous.  Dude went by Seebs on irc way back when.  He was the most well known.  Another one less well known did one of the first recursive troll sites called “Amish queers on the internet” (since one cant be Amish and queer or on he internet). It’s still around I think.  He third was navy intel and lives about 30 feet away from me.

So they swapped to raspberry Pis and dropped all tools they used written for x86. Yeah no