Why does ifconfig for bonded devices show different MAC address than the physical devices?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • Why do we not have same mac address for interface eth8 in the output of ifconfig and /proc/net/bonding/bond0?
[root@example ~]# cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0
Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.4.0-1 (October 7, 2008)

Bonding Mode: load balancing (round-robin)
MII Status: up
MII Polling Interval (ms): 0
Up Delay (ms): 0
Down Delay (ms): 0

Slave Interface: eth0
MII Status: up
Speed: 1000 Mbps
Duplex: full
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 60:eb:69:82:2a:c8

Slave Interface: eth8
MII Status: up
Speed: 1000 Mbps
Duplex: full
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:19:99:96:cd:69
[root@example ~]# ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 60:EB:69:82:2A:C8  
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:618065993 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:1 frame:0
          TX packets:569953145 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:88552706929 (82.4 GiB)  TX bytes:517841087824 (482.2 GiB)
          Memory:92120000-92140000 

[root@example ~]# ifconfig eth8
eth8      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 60:EB:69:82:2A:C8  
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:592106164 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:1 frame:0
          TX packets:569423011 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:86620296239 (80.6 GiB)  TX bytes:517075103956 (481.5 GiB)
          Memory:91a80000-91b00000
  • How to check MAC address of network interfaces when configured with bonding?

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
  • Bonding

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