The Surprising Spectre BHI Mitigation Performance Impact On Meteor Lake
Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 12 January 2026 at 01:38 PM EST. Page 2 of 4. 10 Comments.
Indeed there ended up being a significant cost still to this default Spectre BHI mitigation of using BHI_DIS_S on Meteor Lake. Even with the latest Linux kernel improvements as of Linux 6.18, once booting the same software/hardware with spectre_bhi=off ended up being a noticeable performance improvement in a number of workloads.
In a number of performance sensitive workloads there was a surprising amount of impact from this Spectre BHI mitigation on impact.
The two-year comparison of Meteor Lake on Linux made more sense once carrying out these dedicated Spectre BHI benchmarks.