Pernosco accepts uploaded rr recordings from customers and replays them with binary instrumentation to build a database of all program execution, to power an amazing debugging experience. Our infrastructure is Intel-based AWS instances. Some customers upload recordings made on AMD (Zen) machines; for these recordings to replay correctly on Intel machines, instruction execution needs to produce bit-identical results. This is almost always true, but I recently discovered that the approximate arithmetic instructions RSQRTSS, RCPSS and friends do not produce identical results on Zen vs Intel. Fortunately, since Pernosco replays with binary instrumentation, we can insert code to emulate the AMD behavior of these instructions. I just needed to figure out a good way to implement that emulation.

source: HN