Abstract: Disclosed are systems and methods for executing system calls in a virtualized environment. The described techniques involve trapping a system call invoked a guest process within a virtual machine. The guest process has an associated guest-process virtual address space, and the technique runs a corresponding host process on the host having an associated host-process virtual address space. State changes in the host-process virtual address space caused by the trapped system call are reflected in the guest-process virtual address space, and vice versa. The described technique may be extended to distributed systems having remote and client devices.