Red Hat Knowledgebase

Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3 bonding supports 7 possible "modes" (0-6) for bonded interfaces. These modes determine the way in which traffic sent out of the bonded interface is dispersed over the real interfaces.

To configure the mode of a bonding interface the mode option for the kernel module supporting that interface in /etc/modules.conf must be set. The example lines in /etc/modules.conf could look like the following in order to set the mode of the bond0 interface to 0 and the mode of the bond1 interface to 1.

 
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=0 miimon=100
alias bond1 bonding
options bond1 -o bonding1 mode=1 miimon=100
      

These options are put into place when the module is loaded into the kernel. So in the above example if the mode is changed and the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ are correct the following lines will reload the kernel module with the new mode settings.

service network stop
rmmod bonding
rmmod bonding1
service network start