My understanding of adaptive load balancing for NIC bonding was that it would dynamically abuse ARP requests to cause traffic ingress and outgress to come from different slaves to attempt to optimize traffic.
However, a "currently active slave" seems to indicate that it's using the other slaves for failover instead.
In this context, what does "currently active slave" mean?
In the alb bond currently active slave is the slave, whose MAC address is used as HW address of the bond.
From: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt
A problematic outcome of using ARP negotiation for balancing is that each time that an ARP request is broadcast it uses the hardware address of the bond. Hence, peers learn the hardware address of the bond and the balancing of receive traffic collapses to the current slave. This is handled by sending updates (ARP Replies) to all the peers with their individually assigned hardware address such that the traffic is redistributed.
