how upgrade linux bonding driver ?

[Antonio Cardoso_1]

I have a ML350 systems using the channel bonding driver on RHEL4 OS. The driver release is 2.6.x on RHEL4.
I would like to get a more recent release to take benefit from latest fixes and improvements.
Is there a way to upgrade the driver, or is the upgrade to RHEL5 mandatory ?

thanks much.

[Ivan Ferreira]

As it is a kernel module, probably your best option is to upgrade your kernel.

[rick jones]

Short of back-porting the changes to your RHEL4 kernel sources, I suspect that not only is upgrading the best option, it is the only option.

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

Bonfing driver in RHEL4 kernel is pretty stable, AFAIK.
Do you have some spceific issues?

BTW, did you already with the latest RHEL4 update level?

[Antonio Cardoso_1]

We are using the latest RHEL4 release (update 7), with kernel 2.6.9.78 and bonding driver 2.6.3.

We are looking how to upgrade this driver because, as stated in http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/bonding/bonding.txt, "Starting with version 3.0.2, the bonding driver has logic to
suppress duplicate packets".
And we want a fix for this "duplicated packets" issue, that can be observed in some specific network configurations.

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

I see.
So the only supported by RH option is upgrading to RHEL5.

For sure it is possible technically to upgrade the kernel and/or compile custom kernel with the new driver, but we'll get unsupported system in this way.