Software-based Live Migration for RDMA (MigrRDMA)#
SIGCOMM 2025 digest Program Core pick Coimbra · 8–11 September 2025
Xiaoyu Li et al. (Tsinghua / Microsoft Research)
Why: RDMA live migration has been "needs NIC support, never ships"; doing it in software on commodity RNICs unblocks host maintenance without hardware changes.
What: A software RDMA live-migration layer with little downtime and only 3–9% datapath overhead, adding ~3s to migrated Hadoop job completion.
How: A software indirection layer that keeps RDMA state identical across source and destination from the application's view, enabling transparent switchover; prototyped on Mellanox RNICs.
Where applicable: General technique on commodity RNICs (validated on Mellanox) — broadly relevant to anyone running RDMA workloads in VMs/containers.