Recommendations on NICs used for Channel Bonding (concerns with Inteletherexpress)

[Pfenniger Daniel]

Tom Woo wrote:

> I'm looking to do channel bonding (2x) with 100BT switched ethernet
> involving about 64 machines.  The 3 test machines I currently have all have
> Intel Ether express Pros (INTEL ETHEREXPRESS PRO 10/100+ PCI PILA8460B)
> They all work great with channel bonding on redhat 6.2 and 7.0.  However,
> i've been told that for channel bonding these NICs may not be the best.
> Thus, I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations on what are the best
> NICs for channel bonding, or what NICs to avoid when channel bonding.

We are in the process of doing the same.  Our NICs are tulip based but we got 
a batch of NIC with the 21143 instead of the 21140 chip.   The 21143 
cards have caused a lot of problems, mainly because the tulip driver in the 
Linux kernel are too old with respect to the latest one of Don Becker, 
which is not AFAIK compatible with the 2.4 kernel.  But recently the 
latest 2.4 ac kernels were supporting the 21143 card correctly. 

The only problem remaining is that when the bonding modules is shut down 
the kernel crashes, which is not a too severe problem since in 
production mode this occurs only when rebooting.

	Daniel Pfenniger