ICFP/SPLASH 2025
Sun 12 - Sat 18 October 2025 Singapore

Cross-instruction set architecture (ISA) checkpoint/restoration is becoming increasingly important for live migration in heterogeneous computing environments, where applications need to move seamlessly between ARM, x86, and other processor architectures. While existing approaches either require compilation without Control-flow Integrity (CFI) or suffer from significant performance overhead through interpreter-based execution, we present a novel approach that enables efficient cross-ISA migration using instrumentation during ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation. Our key insight is to leverage machine code instrumentation during AOT compilation, combined with stackmaps, to transform between ISA-dependent machine states and ISA-independent WebAssembly states. This approach employs on-stack replacement techniques from JIT compilers to enable checkpointing at specific program points without requiring the disabling of modern CPU security features such as Control-flow Integrity (CFI). We implement the proposed techniques in Wanco, a WebAssembly AOT compiler supporting Linux on ARM-v8 and x86-64 architectures. Our evaluation demonstrates that Wanco achieves efficient cross-ISA migration compared to CRIU, a standard Linux process migration tool, with 36% overhead on average while extending live migration to cross-ISA scenarios.