Thanks for that, Ed! I swear I spent 15 minutes looking for a preference for that and was totally blind to it. Found it after you prompted me to go look again.

So I have filed another bug about this specifically ( FB9974803 ) even though the one I referred to above ( FB7665061 ) is not closed. I have a (currently) viable workaround (described in FB9974803 ) but we really do need an official API for this task as the KPIs that nw_ethernet_channel is meant to replace are not replaced without a supported method of binding to a specific ethernet NIC.