Like the fixes introduced by other companies, the security patches Microsoft introduced to combat the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities had a negative performance impact on certain systems.<\/p>\n
Windows Kernel team development manager Mehmet Iyigun has now stated on Twitter that the company will reduce the performance hit of these patches in a future update to Windows 10.<\/p>\n
Iyigun said the patch will reduce the performance impact of Spectre v2 mitigations to “noise-level” for most scenarios.<\/p>\n
The update will be rolled out to users in the first half of 2019 and will use Google’s Retpoline solution<\/strong><\/a> to protect against Spectre attacks, while maintaining performance.<\/p>\n Retpoline addresses the second variant of Spectre, which leverages CPU speculative execution to access sensitive data.<\/p>\n \u201cRetpoline\u201d is a portmanteau of \u201creturn\u201d and \u201ctrampoline\u201d, and refers to a software construct that allows indirect branches of a program to be isolated from speculative execution.<\/p>\n Yes, we have enabled retpoline by default in our 19H1 flights along with what we call "import optimization" to further reduce perf impact due to indirect calls in kernel-mode. Combined, these reduce the perf impact of Spectre v2 mitigations to noise-level for most scenarios. https:\/\/t.co\/CPlYeryV9K<\/a><\/p>\n — Mehmet Iyigun (@mamyun) October 18, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n