Michael Larabel at Phoronix spotted that building the Intel Compute Runtime stack with the NEO_DISABLE_MITIGATIONS flag lifts those handbrakes and gets your graphics hardware moving again. Canonical, with Intel nodding in agreement, is planning to ship future Ubuntu packages, likely in version 25.10, with this flag set by default.

The mitigations in question have nothing to do with kernel-level protections. They are part of Intel’s “NEO” GPU compute stack for OpenCL and Level Zero, which had absorbed layers of defensive cruft over time. The performance loss wasn’t trivial, and even Intel’s own binaries on GitHub already come with these mitigations disabled. 

A bug report on Ubuntu’s Launchpad said users can expect “up to 20% performance improvement” but there’s a trade-off.

“We are proposing to eliminate a vulnerability mitigation. Intel and Canonical security have signed off on this change and there are no known exploits.”

Canonical’s devs said “Spectre has been mitigated in the kernel,” and the GPU-level mitigations “no longer offer enough security impact to justify the current performance trade-off.” That’s reassuring, but not exactly bulletproof.

The shift is being tested via a Canonical-hosted PPA, which enables the NEO_DISABLE_MITIGATIONS flag and lets devs poke at the results. Benchmarks are coming soon, but even Larabel confessed he didn’t realise Intel’s mitigations were tanking performance this much.

Chipzilla hasn’t said much, probably because it already slipped this change into its builds and hoped no one would notice.