PR #4613 — enabling jemalloc on arm64 (proxy memory never released on Graviton/aarch64)

What problem are you trying to solve?

The problem: linkerd2-proxy compiles jemalloc in as the global allocator only for x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu. On arm64 the proxy silently falls back to glibc malloc. glibc sizes its arena budget from the host's CPU count (not the container's cgroup limit — 16-64 cores on typical Graviton nodes) and, in practice, retains freed memory in fragmented arenas indefinitely. The result is that proxy RSS on arm64 ratchets up with peak load and never comes back down until the pod restarts. A second-order effect: any MALLOC_CONF tuning users apply per the usual guidance is a silent no-op on arm64, since there's no jemalloc in the binary to read it.

Measured impact (arm64 EKS cluster, meshed services, ~300 pooled HTTP/2 connections per pod): with the stock glibc proxy, closing all pooled connections — freeing their buffers — released zero RSS. With the same proxy version rebuilt with jemalloc enabled for aarch64, the identical experiment released 211MB → ~20MB (−91%) within minutes, reproduced three times. Same traffic, same version; only the allocator differs.

Happy to provide graphs, metric snapshots, or additional testing.

How should the problem be solved?

The change: the x86_64-only gate dates to a time when the jemallocator crate only listed x86_64 as fully tested. tikv-jemallocator 0.6 (already in Cargo.lock) supports aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu, so the PR widens the cfg gate and adds the matching target dependency — 8 lines, no lockfile changes, default behavior unchanged on every other platform. We've been running this build in a production-like environment on Graviton with the results above.

I'd like to flag a data-plane behavior that affects every arm64/aarch64 deployment, and a small PR that addresses it: https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2-proxy/pull/4613

One caveat worth maintainer input: cross-compiling jemalloc's autoconf build for aarch64-gnu from an amd64 host needs a working aarch64 C link path — building natively on arm64 works cleanly; CI may need a toolchain tweak for the cross path.

Any alternatives you've considered?

unable to solve without this change

How would users interact with this feature?

No response

Would you like to work on this feature?

None