Bonding gigabit and fast?

["Tvrtko A. Ursulin" <tvrtko@ursulin.net>]

Hi to all,

Does it make any sense from bandwith point of view to bond gigabit and fast 
ethernet?

I wanted to use adaptive-alb mode to load balance both transmit and receive 
direction of traffic but it seems 8139too does not support it so I use 
balance-rr.

When serving data from the machine I get 13.7 MB/s aggregated while with a 
single slave (so bond still active) I get 5.6 MB/s for gigabit and 9.1 MB/s 
for fast. Yes, that's not a typo - fast ethernet is faster than gigabit.

That is actually another problem I was trying to get to the bottom of for some 
time. Gigabit adapter is skge in a PCI slot and outgoing bandwith oscillates 
a lot during transfer, much more than on 8139too which is both stable and 
faster.

Unfortunately this machine takes low-profile cards and so far I was unable to 
find something other than skge to test with.

Oh and yes, kernel is 2.6.27(-9-generic, so Ubuntu derivative of 2.6.27).

Tvrtko