Revisiting the effects of the Spectre and Meltdown patches using the top-down microarchitectural method and purchasing power parity theory

Abstract

Software patches are made available to fix security vulnerabilities, enhance performance, and usability. Previous works focused on measuring the performance effect of patches on benchmark runtimes. In this study, we used the Top-Down microarchitecture analysis method to understand how pipeline bottlenecks were affected by the application of the Spectre and Meltdown security patches. Bottleneck analysis makes it possible to better understand how different hardware resources are being utilized, highlighting portions of the pipeline where possible improvements could be achieved. We complement the Top-Down analysis technique with the use a normalization technique from the field of economics, purchasing power parity (PPP), to better understand the relative difference between patched and unpatched runs. In this study, we showed that security patches had an effect that was reflected on the corresponding Top-Down metrics. We showed that recent compilers are not as negatively affected as previously reported. Out of the 14 benchmarks that make up the SPEC OMP2012 suite, three had noticeable slowdowns when the patches were applied. We also found that Top-Down metrics had large relative differences when the security patches were applied, differences that standard techniques based in absolute, non-normalized, metrics failed to highlight.

Keywords

• Bottleneck analysis
• System characterization
• Performance measurement