Automatic Generation of Machine Emulators: Efficient Synthesis of Robust Virtual Machines for Legacy Software Migration

Abstract

As older mainframe architectures become obsolete, the corresponding legacy software is increasingly executed via platform emulators running on top of more modern commodity hardware. These emulators are virtual machines that often include a combination of interpreters and just-in-time compilers. Implementing interpreters and compilers for each combination of emulated and target platform independently of each other is a redundant and error-prone task. We describe an alternative approach that automatically synthesizes specialized virtual-machine interpreters and just-in-time compilers, which then execute on top of an existing software portability platform such as Java. The result is a considerably reduced implementation effort.