Heh, yea I was sorely disappointed when I switched from primarily admining AIX to Linux for work. While I had played with Linux long before I got started with AIX, I had only ever used it on desktop workstations and such. Lots of things like ethernet channel bonding that worked fine out of the box on AIX took endless hours of fiddling to get it to sort of work under Linux.
As an AIX admin since 3.2.5 and someone who personally owns AIX hardware, when it comes to device support in AIX it either works perfectly or not at all.
You were not remotely alone. Dissatisfaction with Linux by professionals at the time (surrounding 2005) was more than enough to counter Linux's growing popularity, verve and momentum. Hard to believe that they actually caused Big Blue to act immediately and stop their premature global Linux deployment and their massive Linux marketing campaign cold. This proved to me, at least, that IBM was still alive, and did, in fact, if surprisingly, listen to their customers.
Hmmh? It's pretty well documented in Documentation/networking/bonding.txt in the Linux kernel source tree I thought. I needed our Linux boxes to do bonding somewhere in the 2011-2012 time frame. I don't recall much of a headache.
