Fix for Meltdown and Spectre will affect your server performance!

Microsoft, Apple and several Linux distros started to distribute patches to try to fix the recent security flaws found in Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs, in almost every CPU released in the last 20 years. The security flaws are known as Meltdown (affects Intel) and Spectre (affects Intel, AMD and some ARM processors).

The flaw allow softwares to access protected memory areas that should be accessed only by the Operating System kernel, and get sensitive data, like passwords, etc.

There are two problems with the fixes:

  1. They do not fix 100% of the problem, since it is related on how the CPUs were designed. So far, there is no 100% solution for the problem, and probably it will never exists.
  2. They impact badly in performance.

In a recent post to firebird-devel list, an user reported that the performance of the Firebird server dropped ~30% after he upgraded its Linux kernel to a version that “fix” those security flaws.

General reports over the internet shows that the most affected areas of the system are CPU, RAM and Disk, so any software that makes intensive use of some of those areas will probably have its performance significantly degraded.

Just to be clear: this performance loss doesn’t affect only Firebird, but any software!

Firebird 2.5.8 sub-release is available

Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 2.5.8 — the latest minor release in the Firebird 2.5 series.

This sub-release introduces several bug fixes and a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows and Linux on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms are immediately available for download. Binary kits for Mac OS X will follow shortly.

Jaybird 3.0.3 and 2.2.14 released

The Firebird JDBC team is happy to announce the release of Jaybird 3.0.3 and Jaybird 2.2.14.

Jaybird 3.0.3 contains the following fixes and changes:

  • Fixed: Some older versions of JBoss would throw an java.lang.IllegalStateException: Can't overwrite cause when FBResourceException initialised its exception cause. (JDBC-512)
  • Improved: Added explicit Automatic-Module-Name: org.firebirdsql.jaybird to manifest for forwards compatibility with Java 9 modularization. (JDBC-511)

See the Jaybird 3.0.3 release notes for more information. Jaybird 3.0.3 can be downloaded from the JDBC Driver page.

Jaybird 2.2.14 contains the following fixes and changes:

  • Fixed: FBTraceManager.loadConfigurationFromFile strips line breaks (JDBC-493)
  • Improved: Added explicit Automatic-Module-Name: org.firebirdsql.jaybird to manifest for forwards compatibility with Java 9 modularization. (JDBC-511)

See the Jaybird 2.2.14 release notes for more information. Jaybird 2.2.14 can be downloaded from the JDBC Driver page.

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