> disabling patches on the 4.19.7 kernel no longer affects anything, just made
> several reboots with different patch shutdown options, and without shutting
> down at all, the result is the same. At the moment, my performance is only
> affected by disabling hyper-threading.
This does not match my experience. Using spectre_v2=retpoline makes the default
kernel perform just as well as the vanilla kernel.
I'm using kernel 4.19.7-1-default.