Downfall, known as Gather Data Sampling (GDS) by Intel,[1] is a computer security vulnerability found in 6th through 11th generations of consumer and 1st through 4th generations of Xeon Intel x86-64 microprocessors.
[3][4] Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) security subsystem is also affected by this bug.
[1] The microcode patches have been shown to significantly reduce the performance of some heavily-vectorized loads.
[7] Patches to mitigate the effects of the vulnerability have also been created as part of the forthcoming version 6.5 release of the Linux kernel.
[8] They include code to disable the AVX extensions entirely on CPUs for which microcode mitigation is not available.