Meltdown & Spectre

In Flowmon version 11.0.1 and later, there is a new service for disabling Meltdown & Spectre protection, so that overall performance may be improved if needed. Disabling this protection makes the appliance vulnerable to Meltdown & Spectre exploits and must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis as a tradeoff between protection and performance. The service should never be enabled without prior consultation with Flowmon Support at support.flowmon.com.

Enabling the service means disabling the protection and vice versa.

The service is disabled by default (meaning that the Meltdown & Spectre protection is active).

The service status indicates the following:

• On -> Spectre and Meltdown protection is disabled

• Off -> Spectre and Meltdown protection is enabled

Controlling the service does not require superuser privileges. All four control commands (enable, disable, start, stop) can be run with sudo.

The full list of controls is:

• Start (only current boot)

  • sudo systemctl start spec-melt-vulnerability.service

• Stop (only current boot): 

  • sudo systemctl stop spec-melt-vulnerability.service

• Start (current and all next boots):

  • sudo systemctl start spec-melt-vulnerability.service

  • sudo systemctl enable spec-melt-vulnerability.service

• Stop (current and all next boots):

  • sudo systemctl stop spec-melt-vulnerability.service

  • sudo systemctl disable spec-melt-vulnerability.service

Note that the service name suffix .service must be present in the command, otherwise systemctl will request a password.