Does anyone has the installation of Sierra or High Sierra *before* the meltdown patches?

[camilaacolide]

I work with Virtual Machines all day, but after the meltdown/spectre patches, things have gotten unbearably slow for me.
Does anyone has the installer for Sierra or High Sierra before the patches were made?
Version 10.12.5 or 10.12.6 without Security Update 2018-001 would be perfect.
Please, save my skin! Thanks.

 

[chrfr]

I work with Virtual Machines all day, but after the meltdown/spectre patches, things have gotten unbearably slow for me.
Does anyone has the installer for Sierra or High Sierra before the patches were made?
Version 10.12.5 or 10.12.6 without Security Update 2018-001 would be perfect.
Please, save my skin! Thanks.

The full installer available directly from Apple for Sierra 10.12.6 does not include any of the extra security updates. With that said, the slowdown is almost certainly caused by something else.

 

[camilaacolide]

The full installer available directly from Apple for Sierra 10.12.6 does not include any of the extra security updates. With that said, the slowdown is almost certainly caused by something else.

Are you sure about that? That's would be great news!

I work with two different macbooks pros (mid-2012 and early-2015) and both suffered from a perceptible slowdown at about the same time. Since I could not find the cause for it, I am assuming it might be the meltdown patches. But it might, indeed, be something else.

Thanks.

 

[chrfr]

Are you sure about that? That's would be great news!

I work with two different macbooks pros (mid-2012 and early-2015) and both suffered from a perceptible slowdown at about the same time. Since I could not find the cause for it, I am assuming it might be the meltdown patches. But it might, indeed, be something else.

Thanks.

I support a few hundred Macs for a living. I received no complaints of slowdowns after applying the various updates. Also consider that some of these updates were applied in the form of firmware updates to the computer which are not reversible, so you can never get one of these Macs back to a state where they were prior to all the mitigations for Spectre/Meltdown.

 

[camilaacolide]

Hello @chrfr, thanks for the help before.
Here's some feedback about running Sierra without the Meltdown/Spectre Patches.


Both my Macbook Pros (2015 13" and 2012 15", both with 16GB RAM) were previously running Sierra 10.12.6 with all Security Patches installed. But recently, both were way too slow for my tastes. I don't have many 3rd party applications installed, except for a few that don't keep running in the background, like Microsoft Office. The one application I use all the time is Parallels, with many VMs for development purposes... and running multiple VMs at the same time was really unpleasant, as it made my macbooks kneel.


So, I downloaded the Sierra 10.12.6 installation from the App Store and simply reinstalled over my current Sierra system. Before the reinstall, sw_vers displayed Version 10.12.6 Build 16G2136... after the reinstall, it displayed Version 10.12.6 Build 16G29 (the same version and build as the installer).


After the reinstall, everything was exactly the same, which honestly took me by surprise. I didn't need to reinstall any of my apps, I didn't need to reconfigure anything in System Preferences, Parallels was working as it always had. For all intents and purposes, it felt like booting my macbook before the reinstall... except for the Remote Desktop and Safari updates in the App Store (I blocked the Security Patches update with softwareupdate --ignore)


I've been using Sierra 10.12.6 without the Meltdown/Spectre Patches (or any other Security Patches for that matter) for a week now. And as you said, for day to day activities like browsing, mailing, downloading files, watching videos and writing documents... almost nothing has changed. It feels a little faster, but this could be just a placebo effect.


But...


1. Parallels now flies again. Before the reinstall it usually took more than 10 seconds to start up, but now it starts almost instantly. Running many VMs at the same time is snappy as it should be. The whole virtualization experience (which I believe was heavily affected by the Meltdown/Spectre Patches) is really, really improved, and can be felt immediatelly.

2. There is a program that I use for work that has to read many, many small files. When it runs, it starts by scanning a series of folders containing 250.000 JPG images with 100Kb or less. Scanning these files was kind of laggy, usually displaying the beach ball for about 10 seconds. Now, it scans the files in 1-3 seconds and is really fast.


So, at least for these two scenarios, the removal of the Meltdown/Spectre Patches really made a difference, as they run about 2x-3x faster. I must say I'm wary of running these computers without the Security Patches (apple won't let me selectively install them), but it breathes life into these computers again, for these kinds of workloads.


And that's it.
Thanks a lot for the help.

 

[chrfr]

I've been using Sierra 10.12.6 without the Meltdown/Spectre Patches (or any other Security Patches for that matter) for a week now. And as you said, for day to day activities like browsing, mailing, downloading files, watching videos and writing documents... almost nothing has changed. It felt a little faster, but this could be just a placebo effect.


But...


1. Parallels now flies again. Before the reinstall it usually took more than 10 seconds to start up, but now it starts almost instantly. Running many VMs at the same time is snappy as it should be. The whole virtualization experience (which I believe was heavily affected by the Meltdown/Spectre Patches) is really, really improved, and can be felt immediatelly.

2. There is a program that I use for work that has to read many, many small files. When it runs, it starts by scanning a series of folders containing 250.000 JPG images with 100Kb or less. Scanning these files usually was very slow, usually displaying the beach ball for about 10 seconds. Now, it scans the files in 1-3 seconds and is really fast.


So, at least for these two scenarios, the removal of the Meltdown/Spectre Patches really made a difference, as they run about 2x-3x faster. I must say I'm wary of running these computers without the Security Patches (apple won't let me selectively install them), but it breathes life into these computers again, for these kinds of workloads.


And that's it.
Thanks a lot for the help.

All you've really confirmed is that a clean OS install improved performance. As I said, many of the Spectre/Meltdown fixes were addressed in firmware, and so you still have those in place because the firmware does not get downgraded.

 

[camilaacolide]

Well... I'm just reporting my experience and, in no way, saying you're wrong.

My OS was already quite clean, but a "dirty OS reinstall" could indeed clean it up some more, and maybe be responsible for such perceptible gains. Although these gains were only seem specifically in virtualization and I/O access. I could reinstall the Security Patches to assert once and for all if they were the reason for the performance loss... but I definitely won't do that right now.

I also use Linux quite a lot. There, I can enable/disable the Meltdown/Spectre mitigations. The CPU microcode (firmware) that was updated, and indeed can't be downgraded, at least in Linux is not responsible for perceptible slowdowns... the slowdown only appears when the kernel mitigations are enabled, which leads me to believe that the firmware is not responsible for the bulk of the performance loss.

Anyway, I am happy now! =)