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  1. MariaDB Server
  2. MDEV-36190

Intel TSX-NI can cause a significant regression when TAA mitigation is needed

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Details

    • Related to performance
    • Some lock elision code that was detrimental to performance was removed.
    • Q3/2025 Maintenance, Q4/2025 Server Maintenance

    Description

      alessandro.vetere provided some performance testing results from a system where a transaction asynchronous abort (TAA) mitigation was enabled.

      It would seem to be necessary to disable the use of hardware memory transactions on affected systems, at least in the function buf_page_optimistic_fix() but possibly across the board. A straightforward change on Linux would be to revise the detection function bool transactional_lock_enabled() so that it would avoid setting have_transactional_memory=true if the file /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/tsx_async_abort is readable and contains anything else than the string Not affected.

      Attachments

        1. mdev_36190_flamegraph.svg
          1.50 MB
          Rahul Raj
        2. mdev_36190_perf_graph.png
          32 kB
          Rahul Raj
        3. MDEV-36190-9010-Ubuntu24.04.pdf
          18 kB
          Axel Schwenke
        4. MDEV-36190-A.pdf
          32 kB
          Axel Schwenke
        5. MDEV-36190-Ubuntu24.04.pdf
          33 kB
          Axel Schwenke
        6. MDEV-36190-writeonly-Ubuntu24.04.pdf
          17 kB
          Axel Schwenke

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              marko Marko Mäkelä
              marko Marko Mäkelä
              Alessandro Vetere Alessandro Vetere
              Steve Shaw Steve Shaw
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                Updated:
                Resolved: