Spectre and Meltdown vs. Real-Time: How Much do Mitigations Cost?
summary
Measurements quantify how Spectre/Meltdown mitigations affect real‑time latency: using cyclictest + stress‑ng on Intel Xeon E5, AMD Ryzen 2700X and an NVIDIA Jetson TX1 (Cortex‑A57) with Preempt‑RT and Jailhouse, results show idle jitter under ~5 µs and under load <30 µs without mitigations, then a clear rightward shift when all mitigations enable—Spectre v2 patches cost more than PTI alone, PTI gives intermediate impact, ARM suffers higher per‑call overhead due to privilege switches, and virtualization amplifies worst‑case latencies; statistics use shift‑function/bootstrap.
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chapters (5)
- 0:00Start
- 6:05Page Table Isolation
- 8:16The Page Table Entry Inversion
- 13:52Standard Real-Time Test
- 38:48Conclusion
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