Mitigantions=off?

[supereb]

I have a dedicated computer for audio which I occasionally use on the internet via Wi-Fi. I was thinking of building another kernel without mitigations and my particular wi-fi card disabled. I still need networking to control my MOTU 8pre-ES that is directly connected to my computer via LAN to control its internal mixer via firefox.

From what I understand of how Sceptre/Meltdown work, via a live internet connection, booting to a different kernel for different purposes seems safe. Is this a correct assumption?

[bluebell]

I have a dedicated computer for audio which I occasionally use on the internet via Wi-Fi. I was thinking of building another kernel without mitigations and my particular wi-fi card disabled. I still need networking to control my MOTU 8pre-ES that is directly connected to my computer via LAN to control its internal mixer via firefox.

From what I understand of how Sceptre/Meltdown work, via a live internet connection, booting to a different kernel for different purposes seems safe. Is this a correct assumption?

Mitigations are most important for hosters having multiple clients on the same machine.

For my private single user machines that I use for audio I switch them off permanently. I don't see a relevant security risk.

[Daniele71]

mitigations off here. With a little attention, the risk is very low.

[autostatic]

I disable them too, the risk is low on a single user, bare metal machine. When Spectre/Meltdown got patches I had to work over time, was still working in the hosting business back then with hundreds of VMware instances. Virtualisation was heavily affected by these vulnerabilities. I don't recall we had to scale up any instances because of the extra overhead so I do wonder how much disabling this kernel option affects performance. But then in the end you want to get the most out of your machine, at least I do.

[sunrat]

I just did a quick search of Phoronix about this. For some older processors the hit can be significant - up to 39%!:
Benchmarking The Linux Mitigated Performance For Retbleed: It's Painful
But newer ones have mitigations built in so it impacts less:
Intel Raptor Lake Mitigation Impact Performance Comparison

Mine is an Intel Skylake (i5 6500) which is one of the most affected so I may try disabling mitigations. I feel like it performs worse than when I first built it.