Comment by AdmiralAsshat

I think this may be missing the point of the grandparent comment; rather than interpreting it as an accusation of OpenBSD sabotaging its users' performance, I think we're all just curious at the relative importance of hyperthreading for real-world workloads, on any OS, in grim anticipation of the potential worst-case scenario where hyperthreading's security woes continue to worsen and worsen.

> I think, though, that if you'd be particularly willing to knowingly allow these kinds of vulnerabilities in exchange for some performance, OpenBSD probably isn't a good fit for you in the first place.

I disagree. You may have consciously picked OpenBSD because you believe that security is critical for your business. But if you're renting a server (shared or otherwise) to handle your website and paid for X number of cores, RAM, etc., you establish a baseline for what kind of performance you get out of that setup. If that performance suddenly nosedives 20% overnight because the new mitigation patches turned off hyperthreading, the rig you paid for may have gone from sustainably handling your workload to buckling, causing service degradation, outages, etc. I imagine it could be a real problem. It's not so much "Oh, we can't handle that performance hit, we'll run without it" so much as wanting to know the extent of the damage before they take the plunge.