Windows suffers from similar effects when Virtualization-Based Security is active.
Avamander · 7m ago
At the same time VBS is one of the biggest steps forward in terms of Windows kernel security. It's actually considered a proper security boundary.
api · 1h ago
That's still really massive. It would only make sense in very high security environments.
Honestly running system services in VMs would be cheaper and just as good, or an OS like Qubes. VM hit is much smaller, less than 1% in some cases on newer hardware.
eptcyka · 41m ago
VMs suffer from memory use overhead. Would be cool if the guest kernel would cooperate with the host on that.
traverseda · 11m ago
It will! For Linux hosts and Linux guests, if you use virtio and memory ballooning.
shortrounddev2 · 2m ago
This was an issue for me a few years ago running docker on macOS. macOS required you to allocate memory to docker ahead of time, whereas Windows/Hyper-V was able to use memory ballooning in WSL2
riedel · 49m ago
From reading the article that is the exactly also the feeling of the people involved. The question is if they are on track towards e.g. the 1% eventually.
Traubenfuchs · 40m ago
Sometimes something in me starts thinking about if this regularly occurring slowing of chips through exploit mitigation is deliberate.
All of big tech wins: CPUs get slower and we need more vcpu's and more memory to serve our javascript slop to end customers: The hardware companies sell more hardware, the cloud providers sell more cloud.
gpapilion · 2m ago
I think it’s more pragmatic. We can eliminate hyperthreading to solve this, or increase memory safety at the cost of performance. One is a 50% hit in terms of vcpus, the other is now sub 50%.
Avamander · 9m ago
These types of mitigations have the biggest benefit when resources are shared. Do you really think cloud vendors want to lose performance to CPU or other mitigations when they could literally sell those resources to customers instead?
bzzzt · 21m ago
Why would big tech do this when customers bring it upon themselves by building Javascript slop?
Honestly running system services in VMs would be cheaper and just as good, or an OS like Qubes. VM hit is much smaller, less than 1% in some cases on newer hardware.
All of big tech wins: CPUs get slower and we need more vcpu's and more memory to serve our javascript slop to end customers: The hardware companies sell more hardware, the cloud providers sell more cloud.