Techniques for live migrating a paravirtual remote direct memory access (PVRDMA) virtual machine (VM) from a source host system to a destination host system are provided. In one set of embodiments, during a pre-copy phase of the live migration process, a source hypervisor of the source host system can invoke an application programming interface (API) exposed by a source host channel adapter (HCA) of the source host system for initiating write tracing of remote direct memory access (RDMA) writes/atomic operations received from remote endpoints and can retrieve a write trace element generated by the source HCA that identifies a memory region of the PVRDMA VM written to as a result of an RDMA write/atomic operation and a write location within the memory region. The source hypervisor can then identify one or more guest memory pages of the PVRDMA VM dirtied per the write trace element and transmit data contents of those pages to the destination host system.