[Beowulf] Update on dealing with Spectre and Meltdown

[Gavin W. Burris]

Just had our biannual maintenance window.  All the things are patched.  One could disable the performance-killing patches with the "noibrs noibpb nopti" grub options.  Cheers.

On Thu 03/08/18 01:55PM EST, Ryan Novosielski wrote:
> I have been waiting, specifically, for Prentice Bisbal to try it. :-P
> 
> I actually have not checked to see whether any other upgrades I’ve applied have handled these vulnerabilities (I’d assume RedHat would have patched their distribution). FWIW, however, I did receive a report that one of our newer images seemed slower.  Haven’t gotten a chance to fully investigate those reports — could be any number of other things.
> 
> --
> ____
> || \\UTGERS,       |---------------------------*O*---------------------------
> ||_// the State     |         Ryan Novosielski - novosirj at rutgers.edu<mailto:novosirj at rutgers.edu>
> || \\ University | Sr. Technologist - 973/972.0922 (2x0922) ~*~ RBHS Campus
> ||  \\    of NJ     | Office of Advanced Research Computing - MSB C630, Newark
>     `'
> 
> On Mar 8, 2018, at 13:13, Alex Chekholko via Beowulf <beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>> wrote:
> 
> As an experienced and cynical HPC admin working with trusted users... I have not installed any kind of firmware or kernel updates.  I'll wait for you to go first :)
> 
> On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 10:10 AM, Prentice Bisbal <pbisbal at pppl.gov<mailto:pbisbal at pppl.gov>> wrote:
> Beowulfers,
> 
> Have any of you updated the kernels on your clusters to fix the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities? I was following this issue closely for the first couple of weeks. There seemed to be a lack of consensus on how much these fixed would impact HPC jobs, and if I recall correctly, some of the patches really hurt performance, or caused other problems. We took a wait-and-see approach here. So now that I've waited a while, what did you see?
> 
> --
> Prentice
> 
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-- 
Gavin W. Burris
Senior Project Leader for Research Computing
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
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