Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Old machines lose 20% or more performance because of "meltdown/spectre" mitigations.

Most new or newer versions of Puppy provide what is needed to have this activated in the CPU.

To not have this possible hit on performance. (depends on the CPU).

They have to be turned off at boot time with the kernel parameter "mitigations=off" (on v5/v6 kernels).

In the boot loader menu config file entries add mitigations=off to the end of the Linux or kernel line.

Most all are now using Grub2 as the boot loader, so the grub.cfg file is the file to edit.

Also could edit out the stuff in the grub.cfg entries that is doing the install of the "meltdown/spectre" mitigations.

But some of the entries are complicated and you may, at some time, want it active again.
So adding the mitigations=off is easier and gives you, by removing it, an easy way to turn it back on.

@bigpup

I am surprised at your statement and encouragement to disable the use of the implementation and use of measures to combat "meltdown/spectre" mitigations

However, it is down to personal choice, I guess the same applies to anti-virus software, firewalls etc.

I would advocate a risk assessment to be undertaken by a user ie

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... ation.html

A potential concern for me (.......need to read up on this!!) is the implementation of Secrets API

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specif ... i-0.1.html

Two examples of applications that use this are KeepassXC and the browser Chrome.

Each to their own I guess

My post is not saying do it or do not do it.

It is a how to do it.