linux-drivers/
drivers/infiniband/hw/erdma

Alibaba Elastic RDMA Adapter (eRDMA)

Alibaba Cloud's in-house RDMA network adapter, exposed to virtual machines on many of Alibaba's ECS instance families so workloads can use low-latency remote direct memory access over the cloud network. It is a cloud-only NIC, not something sold as a retail card, and Alibaba has been rolling out eRDMA-enabled instance types through 2025 and 2026.

keep conf=0.94 deploy=medium replacement=none subsystem=infiniband category=networking-other
94%

recommendation

It should stay in the kernel because the hardware is part of an actively expanding Alibaba Cloud product line, the vendor maintains the driver in-house, and upstream RDMA maintainers were still accepting fixes as recently as August 2025. Anyone running Linux on an eRDMA-capable Alibaba ECS instance relies on this code, so there is no case for deprecation.

repository signals

13 files
7,911 source lines
78 commits, 5y
+9,187 / −1,260 lines added / removed, 5y
16 authors, 5y
monthly commits · 2021-04-21 → 2026-04-21 · 78 total · active in 22/61 months
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sources

  1. spinics.net

    Upstream RDMA maintainer accepted ERDMA fixes in August 2025 ('Applied to for-next' / 'Applied to for-rc'), showing active maintenance rather than removal.

  2. alibabacloud.com

    Alibaba Cloud documented many eRDMA-capable ECS instance families on March 13, 2026, indicating the hardware/service remains in current deployment and available for new instances.

  3. alibabacloud.com

    Alibaba Cloud states the eRDMA driver is developed in-house, technically supported, and publishes 2025 installer releases, indicating ongoing product support and deployment.

  4. cateee.net

    LKDDb shows CONFIG_INFINIBAND_ERDMA present in mainline kernels 6.0-6.19/7.0 and identifies PCI ID 1ded:107f for Alibaba Elastic RDMA Adapter.

codex reasoning notes (technical)

Real driver directory: Kconfig/module metadata and local source mention 'Alibaba Elastic RDMA Adapter'. Lore MCP was unavailable, so upstream-activity evidence came from shell inspection plus web archive mirrors: local `git -c safe.directory=... log` showed substantive ERDMA work through 2025-11-03, and a local `git log --grep remove|deprecat|obsolete` scan found no removal discussion. URL evidence was obtained via web search/open: Spinics thread confirms 2025 fixes were accepted upstream; Alibaba Cloud docs show eRDMA-enabled instance families and supported driver releases in 2025-2026; LKDDb confirms current upstream presence and device ID. This is an actively maintained cloud-specific RDMA driver with current deployments, so removal/deprecation is not indicated.