How are your expierences with Spectre / Meltdown fighting so far?
Hello everyone,
I would like to ask anyone how they / their company is currently handling Spectre / Meltdown and what policies or measurements apply. Would be also interesting to hear how Acronis is affected by these.
In my occupation as IT specialist, most of our business customers hesistate to apply patches (regarding Windows, VMware ESX, Citrix, Datacore, Commvault etc) because of possible sideeffects.
In fact I read about many issues where applications or complete servers stopped working or get in an instable state.
My current policy for home users and businesses alike is to patch top > down level , so begin with Windows and Browsers, go on with GPU drivers etc, then patching Hypervisors / Hardware and CPU at the end of the chain as microcode / BIOS updates cannot be (easily) reverted.
I have made good experiences in customer products including my own computers based on Kaby Lake and Skylake.
Also I've spent a remarkable time on benchmarking a baseline without any Spectre / Meltdown patches, Windows patches, Windows + CPU patches. The peformance losses were about 3% on Kaby Lake on all tests made.
Samsung Magician 5.1 showed -40% performance on random 4k writes on M2 SSD but this got magicially fixed by Samsung with Magician 5.2 release. It was noticable that the 40% performance hit was not reproducible on other tests as AS SSD Benchmark or PC Mark 10.

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Thanks Ekaterina!
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