DSM Installation and Configuration Guide
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Appendix E: Bonding Driver Modes
This section describes all of the supported Bonding Driver modes.
Mode
Name
Description
Load-
balancing
Fault
tolerance
0
balance-rr
Round-robin policy. Transmit packets in sequential order from the first
available through the last. This is the default mode for the bonded
NICs.
Yes
Yes
1
active-backup
Active-backup policy: Only one slave in the bond is active. A different
slave becomes active if, and only if, the active slave fails. The bond's
MAC address is externally visible on only one port (network adapter)
to avoid confusing the switch.
No
Yes
2
balance-xor
XOR policy: Transmit based on the selected transmit hash policy. The
default policy is a simple [(source MAC address XOR'd with
destination MAC address) modulo slave count].
Yes
Yes
3
broadcast
Broadcast policy: transmits everything on all slave interfaces.
No
Yes
4
802.3ad
IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Creates aggregation groups
that share the same speed and duplex settings. Utilizes all slaves in
the active aggregator according to the 802.3ad specification.
Yes
Yes
5
balance-tlb
Adaptive transmit load balancing: channel bonding that does not
require any special switch support. The outgoing traffic is distributed
according to the current load (computed relative to the speed) on each
slave. Incoming traffic is received by the current slave. If the receiving
slave fails, another slave takes over the MAC address of the failed
receiving slave.
Yes
Yes
6
balance-alb
Adaptive load balancing: includes balance-tlb plus receive load
balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic, and does not require any special switch
support. The receive load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation.
The bonding driver intercepts the ARP Replies sent by the local
system on their way out and overwrites the source hardware address
with the unique hardware address of one of the slaves in the bond
such that different peers use different hardware addresses for the
server.
Yes
Yes