Exactly. I just tried shutting off mitigations on an old laptop running BOINC, triggering the benchmarks before and after shutting them off. It made no differen

Exactly. I just tried shutting off mitigations on an old laptop running BOINC, triggering the benchmarks before and after shutting them off. It made no difference whatsoever - not surprising, since that's compute-bound and isn't likely to have lots of system calls. How much that translates to the running applications remains to be seen.