Hi, a new serious hardware bug has been discovered in all modern Intel cpus. I'm slightly worried that vmix is about to take a decent performance loss very soon.

https://www.theregister....2/intel_cpu_design_flaw/

Is it too early to tell in any way how / if the recently announceed "Intel Design Flaw Fiasco" and subsequent "Performance Killing Patch" will affect vMix usage? From what I understand, it's isolated to certain scenarios and functions, and that "30% less performance" that's being reported will only rear it's head in certain scenarios:

"The expected short term solution will come from OSes: operating systems can apply what's called a kernel Page Table Isolation (PTI) that cloaks kernel memory addresses. The caveat is that the fix will force the CPU to constantly flush its caches that hold its TLBs, or translation look-aside buffers, which are essentially caches that allow the CPU to quickly access user memory."

"In some instances, a performance hit of up to 30 percent or more can be seen, due to the CPU flushing caches, and having to go to slower main memory to access data. While the instances are currently regulated to I/O intensive applications and virtual machines, it does pose a potential situation for slowdown in a desktop environment."


Signs seem to be pointing to vMix performance taking a hit, understandly this is out of the vMix team's control, but many users are a bit worried about this. Normally I wouldn't jump straight to summoning him, I know he's busy, but since he'd be the only one that would know - I'm requesting comment from Martin, when and if he feels comfortable doing so, of course.

Thanks.

How the Linux tribe handles the matter is of little value to vMix. How Microsoft handles it is what will matter. We'll know soon enough. Those who bought a more capable CPU than they needed will surely be rewarded.

Intel has issued a statement

https://www.pcworld.com/...-the-cpu-kernel-bug.html

Tom,

I wonder if that is relevant to just linux and not windows. Bottom line, I don't know what a kernel is and I also don't know what linux is other that it is an operating system and sounds like a peanuts character. Is this relevant to windows???? Sure hope so.

The text says
Michael Larabel, the open-source guru behind the Linux-centric Phoronix website, has run a gauntlet of benchmarks using Linux 4.15-rc6, an early release candidate build of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel. It includes the new Linux KPTI protections for the Intel CPU kernel flaw. The Core i7-8700K saw a massive performance decrease in FS-Mark 3.3 and Compile Bench, a pair of synthetic I/O benchmarks. PostgreSQL and Redis suffered a loss, but to a far lesser degree. Finally, H.264 video encoding, timed Linux kernel compilation, and FFmpeg video conversion tasks didn’t lose anything.

Windows 10 patches for Meltdown are out as of yesterday (Jan 3rd). Windows 7 and 8 patches release next Tuesday.

Kane Peterson
NewTek