Sometimes you have to make a choice: Security or performance. Canonical and Intel have apparently now made this choice – against overcautious security dogmatism and in favor of a few percentage points more graphics performance. And who can blame them? If you spend years chasing a ghost that never materialized, at some point it’s okay to start chasing ghosts.
20% more steam – by leaving it out
What happened? Canonical, the guardians of the Ubuntu gospel, and Intel, the veterans of x86 realpolitik, are removing the Spectre mitigations for integrated Intel GPUs from the compute runtime with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10. The performance gains: up to 20 %. The security gains beforehand: tend to be academic. Because despite all the theoretical attack vectors, no real exploit has yet been seen in the GPU area – and even that would have long been covered at kernel level anyway. “Spectre? Yes, that used to be important. Five years ago. Maybe. Today it’s like a bicycle helmet in a tank: soothes the conscience, but costs fuel.” The fact that the GPU mitigations were classified as “no longer security-relevant enough” is not just a technical detail. It is an official all-clear – and at the same time a silent capitulation to the realization that overengineering is sometimes more expensive than the risk itself.
Strategic readjustment
Of course, this is not entirely coincidental. Intel is undergoing a profound paradigm shift: Arrow Lake is just around the corner, Battlemage has been half-buried and the embedded and AI sector is suddenly back in the game. You can’t afford a 20% loss of performance on iGPUs that are already underperforming – not when AMD’s Radeon 780M is cheerfully catching up with RDNA3. Incidentally, Intel has been delivering the compute runtime without the mitigations for some time now – on GitHub, mind you, far away from the official Linux repositories. So anyone who believes that Canonical is the driver of the decision is very much mistaken. Canonical is only paving the way for what Intel has long been doing.
The illusion of security
Of course, the whole thing is accompanied by a “formal review process” – after all, they don’t want to give anyone the feeling that they’re optimizing on the spur of the moment. But if you read between the lines, it sounds more like: “If you patch the kernel anyway, you don’t need the rest. And if you don’t, it’s your own fault anyway.” In other words: responsibility is delegated downwards – to the users, to the distributions, to reality. That may sound cynical. But it is a realistic move. After all, the complexity of today’s security architectures has now reached a level where they block each other. Performance, maintainability and actual protection often form an unholy triangle. And at some point you have to sacrifice a corner.
The reaction? Cautious pragmatism
The Linux community is taking it surprisingly calmly. No outcry, no flame war on Reddit – almost as if people had been waiting for this step for a long time. Or as if it had secretly been done long ago – unofficially, quietly, with deactivated build flags in the basement of the CI pipelines. So it remains to be seen how the whole thing will play out in everyday life. For developers and power users, it is a welcome liberation. For security-fanatic company admins, it may be an alarm signal – but even they know that even the toughest system will fail at some point due to human error.
Conclusion with a wink
When even Intel says that its own GPU no longer needs Spectre mitigations, then this is either an act of radical honesty – or the last attempt to somehow make the iGPU sexy. Either way: For us, this means more performance at no extra cost. And in times of stagnating innovation, that’s almost a small victory.
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