The Definitive Guide to Make Software Fail on ARM64

Thursday, June 13, 2019 - 3:00 pm3:30 pm

Ignat Korchagin, Cloudflare

Abstract: 

Cloudflare operates a large distributed network: we have more than 165 data centres across 75 countries. We recently decided to integrate a second CPU architecture into our infrastructure. The obvious choice was ARM64. Apart from doing the basic hardware bring up we also needed to port all our software stack to ARM64, which includes a lot of in-house and third-party open-source components. Turns out, even if the software is written in a cross-platform architecture-agnostic language, there are a lot of potential ways it can fail on a different architecture. This presentation describes the issues we encountered, when porting our software to ARM64 and provides some advice for developers and SRE on how to avoid them, when adopting new code.

Ignat Korchagin, Cloudflare

Ignat Korchagin is a security engineer at Cloudflare working mostly on platform and hardware security. Ignat’s interests are cryptography, hacking, and low-level programming. Before Cloudflare, Ignat worked as a senior security engineer for Samsung Electronics’ Mobile Communications Division.

Open Access Media

USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.

BibTeX
@conference {233245,
author = {Ignat Korchagin},
title = {The Definitive Guide to Make Software Fail on {ARM64}},
year = {2019},
address = {Singapore},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jun
}

Presentation Video