A mechanism for temporarily stalling selected Direct Memory Access (DMA) operations in a physical I/O adapter in order to permit migration of data between physical pages that are subject to access by the physical I/O adapter. When a request for a DMA to a physical page in system memory is received from an input/output adapter, a migration in progress (MIP) bit in a translation control entry (TCE) pointing to the physical page is examined, wherein the MIP bit indicates whether migration of the physical page referenced in the TCE to another location in system memory is currently in progress. If the MIP bit indicates a migration of the physical page is in progress, the DMA from the input/output adapter is temporarily stalled while other DMA operations from other input/output adapters to other physical pages in system memory are allowed to continue.