Are you saying windows runs 28% slower than Linux systems?
“Intel has worked with the Linux community and VMM vendors to provide customers with software mitigation guidance which should be available on or around today's public disclosure date,” Intel wrote in a blog post. “Note that Windows systems are not affected given that these systems use Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) by default which is also the mitigation being made available to Linux users. Intel is not aware of this issue being exploited outside of a controlled lab environment.”
Yes, context switching specifically. It's well known that if spawning thousands of child processes, or if walking a directory of 100k small files to get metadata, linux can be much faster than windows. You might consider these just bad program design - on windows you'd strongly prefer to use many threads, and pack files of some kind (zip, cab, etc). There ends up being lots of different reasons why this kind of stuff can be rather slow on windows (but if you deal with fewer processes and fewer files you won't notice, it'll be fine). Some fascinating details: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/04/21/on2-in-createpr... (and that blog has many similar fascinating posts)
“Intel has worked with the Linux community and VMM vendors to provide customers with software mitigation guidance which should be available on or around today's public disclosure date,” Intel wrote in a blog post. “Note that Windows systems are not affected given that these systems use Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) by default which is also the mitigation being made available to Linux users. Intel is not aware of this issue being exploited outside of a controlled lab environment.”
There’s also other mitigations that don’t have that penalty that are working on employing: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...