Recently, we have seen growing pressure to move highperformance workloads, such as HPC and AI, to cloud environments that offer more affordable and manageable infrastructure. These workloads require direct access to RDMA devices for high-performance communication. Device passthrough, however, violates the decoupling between the guest OS and the underlying hardware, making Live Migration (LM) extremely challenging [29, 38, 40, 42, 48].

CPUs routinely offload to NICs network-related processing tasks like packet segmentation and checksum. NIC offloads are advantageous because they free valuable CPU cycles. But their applicability is typically limited to layer≤4 protocols (TCP and lower), and they are inapplicable to layer-5 protocols (L5Ps) that are built on top of TCP. This limitation is caused by a misfeature we call ”offload dependence,” which dictates that L5P offloading additionally requires offloading the underlying layer≤4 protocols and related functionality: TCP, IP, firewall, etc. The dependence of L5P offloading hinders innovation, because it implies hard-wiring the complicated, ever-changing implementation of the lower-level protocols.