ARM64 is the Future (And the Future is Broken)

They told us ARM64 was the promised land.

“It’s cheaper!” they said. “It’s more power-efficient!” they said. “Amazon Graviton is 40% faster for 20% less cost!”

What they didn’t mention is that you will spend the rest of your natural life recompiling C libraries.

I recently decided to deploy Beta9 (a GPU runtime) on Oracle Cloud’s Ampere A1 instances. Because I like pain. And because Oracle gives you 4 cores and 24GB of RAM for free, which appeals to my inner cheapskate.

It was a masterclass in what I call Binary Compatibility Hell.

The “Write Once, Run Anywhere” Lie

Java promised “Write Once, Run Anywhere.” Go promised “Cross-Compilation is Easy.”

reality promises: “Exec format error.”

Exhibit A: JuiceFS and the GLIBC Mismatch

I needed JuiceFS. The Dockerfile downloaded a pre-built binary. Standard stuff.

/usr/local/bin/juicefs: /lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.32' not found

Ah, GLIBC version errors. The classic Linux hazing ritual. The binary wanted GLIBC 2.32. Debian Bullseye has 2.31.

So I had to build it from source. But wait! JuiceFS needs SQLite support, which means CGO_ENABLED=1. Which means you need the C toolchain. Which means you are no longer a “Cloud Native Engineer,” you are a 1990s SysAdmin trying to get gcc to link against the right headers.

I spent 4 hours fixing this. To save $0.04/hour.

Exhibit B: GeeseFS and the Silent Architecture Failure

The script downloaded GeeseFS. It ran fine.

exec format error

It downloaded the AMD64 binary. Because of course it did. The script didn’t check uname -m. It just assumed you were on Intel, like a civilized person.

The Bitnami Trap

I used the Bitnami Redis chart. Pinned to a specific tag. Result: 404 Not Found. Why? because Bitnami rotates tags faster than a startup pivots.

If you pin versions, you break when they delete the tag. If you use :latest, you break when they change the API. There is no winning move.

The Solution (If You Can Call It That)

I fixed it. It works now. But my Dockerfile looks like a crime scene. It has sed commands patching URLs. It has multi-stage builds just to compile a filesystem driver.

The moral of the story? ARM64 is great. The cloud is cheap. But you pay for it with your sanity.

Read the Gory Details (If You Masochistically Enjoy Makefiles)