The Spectre/Meltdown issues are fundamental and "difficult" to fix - but mostly exist because we can observe state using very fine grained performance counters.

The Spectre/Meltdown issues are fundamental and "difficult" to fix - but mostly exist because we can observe state using very fine grained performance counters. Why not disable (or dumb down) the performance counters, and leave the bugs and better performance in place? We could enable the counters (and the mask bugs and reduce performance) by normally-off a BIOS flag. I for one would rather have the performance and don't need the counters for day-to-day ops.