The definitive guide to making software fail on ARM64

Ignat Korchagin (Cloudflare)

13:25–14:05 Wednesday, 6 November 2019

Location: Hall A3

Building Resilient Systems

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Who is this presentation for?

System engineers, SREs, DevOps practitioners, and Linux nerds

Level

Intermediate

Description

Adopting a second CPU architecture into x86-only infrastructure can be a challenging task. Not only do you have to find the right hardware and learn how to properly provision it, but you also need to port the whole software stack, which was probably developed and improved for a number of years without having this second architecture in mind.

And even though you might think that all the components of your stack are written in a cross-platform architecture-agnostic language (like Go or Java), there are still many ways they can fail on a secondary architecture after porting. Ignat Korchagin examines the issues Cloudflare encountered when porting its software stack to ARM64 and offers advice on how to avoid them when writing new code.

Prerequisite knowledge

A basic understanding of Linux and OS design

What you'll learn

Understand that even if software is written in cross-platform architecture-agnostic language, it might still fail on nonprimary architectures and that you shouldn't over optimize, you should explicitly state your assumptions—preferably in code
Learn why you should test and validate as much as possible and as early as possible

Ignat Korchagin

Cloudflare

Ignat Korchagin is a systems engineer at Cloudflare, where he works mostly on platform and hardware security. Ignat’s interests are cryptography, hacking, and low-level programming. Previously, he was senior security engineer for Samsung Electronics’s Mobile Communications Division, and his solutions can be found in many older Samsung smartphones and tablets. Ignat started his career as a security researcher in the Ukrainian government’s communications services.