Toward Practical Cross-Platform Execution for Legacy Software

Abstract

Maintaining compatibility between legacy applications and modern hardware platforms remains a long-standing problem in system engineering. Although virtualization and dynamic translation technologies enable functional portability, their practical performance often deviates from theoretical expectations when deployed in real operating environments. In this study, we analyze cross-platform execution behavior in a mixed-architecture testbed consisting of x86 and ARM servers running full-system Linux guests. Through detailed profiling, we identify instruction translation locality, memory aliasing, and exception synchronization as major contributors to runtime overhead. Based on these observations, we introduce a set of lightweight optimization techniques, including translation region consolidation, adaptive cache placement, and deferred synchronization mechanisms. Experimental results show that the proposed optimizations improve execution stability under long-running workloads and reduce performance variance across different application types. Rather than focusing on peak throughput, this work emphasizes predictable and maintainable performance in heterogeneous environments.