I got as far as "HyperThreading is insecure so disable it".
There are some absurd recommendations on here (disable TCP SACK, use TCP BBR) and the weirdest of all is why anyone who hates FreeBSD security this much would still use the OS?
There are some absurd recommendations on here (disable TCP SACK, use TCP BBR) and the weirdest of all is why anyone who hates FreeBSD security this much would still use the OS?
The performance benefits of HT are also not at all universal. I mean, they do exist in some cases—if you’re running closely related scalar-compute- (or, better, dependency-) bound tasks that bang on the same small piece of memory, or if you run several things that are just bad at loading the CPU so HT-induced contention doesn’t matter. (The latter scenario was obviously much more important at the time HT was introduced, when neither people nor compilers were particularly good at optimizing for superscalars.) Or, though it’s not a performance benefit, it can help if you have few cores and the OS scheduler is bad at letting interactive tasks run in the presence of long-running batch ones or heavy swapping. But properly optimized multithreaded data crunching like video coding or compression doesn’t really run faster when given extra threads to run on HT “cores” rather than just leaving them disabled or idle.
Perhaps we're getting to a point that both disabled is faster than both enabled (and suffering from the mitigations penalties)
At an old job, we disabled SMT on our hypervisor hosts in an effort to mitigate some of the security issues before patches were available. We had to roll back. Without SMT, the hosts struggled to keep up with load. If I had to quantify it, I'd estimate that we lost, at least, 30% performance by disabling SMT (probably more). Those servers were replaced before I left, but I'd be interested to compare disabled SMT to enabled SMT with all the current mitigations in place.
[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/new-spectre-vulnerabilities-amd-in...
It doesn’t seem odd to me at all that this individual would continue to use freebsd while maintaining such strongly held critiques of it.