Why does mode 6 (balance-alb) bonding not work correctly in RHEL 6.4 on boot?

Issue

• In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, when configuring a mode 6 (also known as balance-alb, or adaptive load balancing) on first boot or after reboot of a system, the system is inaccessible from the network until a restart of the network services is performed:

# service network restart

• When using be2net driver, the following message is printed:

be2net 0000:04:00.1: opcode 60-1 failed:status 3-4