Meltdown patch breaking stuff?

Crivens

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Title says it all, I fear.

Today I was using emulators/uae again and it was horribly unstable. It did not crash but the emulated machine was unusable, rendering errors, reboots, problems...

After disabling the kernel map isolation by setting hw.pmap.kpi (?) to 0 and rebooting, stability improved a lot. Not as good as before, but a lot better.

Now to check if this is some aging memory in my laptop, simple chance or some bug- I call upon users of emulators (no virtualisation like bhyve) if they can confirm or deny this.

Please pipe up you lot.
 
What brand of machine? It is reported that for Linux at least, some brands of machines (eg. Toshiba laptops) also need a firmware update (BIOS / UEFI) in addition to the latest Meltdown / Spectre patches. I do not know if a missing firmware update would create instability.
 
It's an older core2duo ASUS laptop, no luck with updates for a machine older that 10 years. What bugs me is that uae itself (and basilisk f.e.) do not experience crashes, only the systems they emulate are now close to useless. :(
 
I use qemu on FreeBSD (11.1-RELEASE-p10 r333429: amd64). I applied meltdown patches 18 days ago. Due to a very busy schedule at work I didn't have much time to play with the qemu ; basic checks work fine though.
 
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