Varuna: Enabling Failure-Type Aware RDMA Failover

TL;DR

Varuna is a failure-type-aware RDMA recovery mechanism that improves failover efficiency by selectively retransmitting requests based on whether they were executed before a link failure.

Contribution

It introduces a lightweight completion log that enables correct, selective retransmission of RDMA requests, reducing recovery time and overhead during link failures.

Findings

Reduces recovery retransmission time by 65%.

Incurs only 0.6-10% latency overhead in steady state.

Preserves transactional consistency during failover.

Abstract

RDMA link failures can render connections temporarily unavailable, causing both performance degradation and significant recovery overhead. To tolerate such failures, production datacenters assign each primary link with a standby link and, upon failure, uniformly retransmit all in-flight RDMA request over the backup path. However, we observe that such blanket retransmission is unnecessary. In-flight requests can be split into pre-failure and post-failure categories depending on whether the responder has already executed. Retransmitting post-failure requests is not only redundant (consuming bandwidth), but also incorrect for non-idempotent operations, where duplicate execution can violate application semantics. We present Varuna, a failure-type-aware RDMA recovery mechanism that enables correct retransmission and us-level failover. Varuna piggybacks a lightweight completion log on every RDMA operation; after a link failure, this log deterministically reveals which in-flight requests were executed (post-failure) and which were lost (pre-failure). Varuna then retransmits only the pre-failure subset and fetches/recovers the return values for post-failure requests. Evaluated using synthetic microbenchmarks and end-to-end RDMA TPC-C transactions, Varuna incurs only 0.6-10% steady-state latency overhead in realistic applications, eliminates 65% of recovery retransmission time, preserves transactional consistency, and introduces zero connectivity rebuild overhead and negligible memory overhead during RDMA failover.