While these benchmarks should show any differences in raw processing performance, there's also the question of what differences the hardening measures make to application start-up times. PIE in particular should cause some slowdown when the executables are first run, but it would take some other sort of benchmark to determine the impact. PIE also makes prelinking ineffective, so it would probably be worth testing the difference between prelinked and PIE executables. On Wednesday 05 March 2008, Kees Cook wrote: > I also ran inkscape and nexuiz tests on x86_64, and there was no > measurable difference. I'm unclear if this was due to the extra > registers, or just that that CPU was much faster and the difference > vanished into the noise. The x86_64 arch has special hardware to better support PIE, so the lack of any noticeable difference in performance is likely due to that.
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