According to Tom's Hardware , E cores are used in most of Intel's latest consumer processor generations, from Alder Lake to Meteor Lake, as well as in Atom chips. There is already a protection mechanism against malware exploiting this vulnerability, but enabling its protection will affect system performance.
RFDS vulnerability exists on modern Intel processors with energy-efficient E cores
Register File Data Sampling (RFDS) is one of the latest vulnerabilities discovered in Intel processors that allows attackers to gain access to processor registers and the data stored in them. Compared to the previously disclosed Meltdown and Downfall vulnerabilities, RFDS is not widespread because it only affects processors with energy-efficient E cores, including Gracemont and Crestmont cores.
After Intel released OS patches and microcode updates to fix the RFDS vulnerability, Phoronix tested the impact of the patches by running 46 benchmark tests with a Core i9-14900K CPU on Linux. On average, performance dropped by 5%, with some tasks seeing up to 10%. This is not a significant drop compared to the aforementioned Downfall fixes, which saw performance drops of up to 39%. The slight performance drop could be due to the E cores being used for background tasks.
To remove the RFDS vulnerability, users need to update their operating systems and microcode. Motherboard manufacturers have already started releasing BIOS updates to address RFDS, Linux users have received a patch in the latest OS update, while Windows users will likely receive a patch in the next update.
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