A pod is CrashLoopBackOff with no application stack trace. The container manifest’s image field references an upstream tag that “should” work. The Docker pull succeeded. The container starts, exits with no log output, and restarts. The cause is almost always architecture: the image was published linux/amd64 only, the host is ARM64 (Apple Silicon, Graviton, Ampere), and the runtime is silently emulating — or failing to emulate — the binary. When upstream publishes ARM64 source artifacts but no ARM64 image, the fix is to build one.

ARM64 Kubernetes: The QEMU Problem with Go Binaries#

If you run Kubernetes on Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) via minikube with the Docker driver, you will eventually try to run an amd64-only container image. For most software this works through QEMU emulation. For Go binaries, it crashes hard.

The Problem#

Go’s garbage collector uses a lock-free stack (lfstack) that packs pointers with counter bits in the high bits of a 64-bit integer. QEMU’s user-mode address translation changes the effective address space layout, which breaks this packing assumption. The result: