RDMA, Remote DMA, allows remote systems to read and write directly from local memory. This is typically used by high-performance network interfaces, such as data centers and clusters. RDMA gives you high bandwidth and low latency. It typically requires support from the network interfaces, as well as potentially adapting the applications.
This talk is a short HOWTO on using RDMA with Debian to make their high-performance network run faster. We will demonstrate how to test RDMA support without any specialized hardware (using soft-RoCE), and how to use it with existing applications (with libvma).Then finally, we will review the state of RDMA in buster and what is still missing, both in the kernel and user-space tools.