Adding bonding to Kernel causes 1 NIC to disappear

[Abzie]

To cut to the chase, I have a Netgear ReadyNAS 104 running ALarm with it's dual NIC setup, running 4.4.1 custom kernel for my server. It connects a-ok with systemd-networkd when the NIC's are used individually and are mapped to eth0/1. When I build the kernel with bonding support built in, for some reason eth1 disappears and bond0 created in /sys/class/net. If I comment out bonding in the kernel config and rebuild, eth1 appears again and bond0 is removed as expected. Bringing bond0 up with ip link fails with "device not ready".

I have disabled networkd and tried netctl trying to resolve this, but netctl status bond1 gives exit code 1 stating 'eth1 device not found' when starting or switching to the bonding configuration. I haven't yet tried NetworkManager yet. It's just the eth1 device doesn't exist in all logs, yet it's fine and the NIC is usable when the bonding driver isn't included in the kernel.

Again, I literally edit/add CONFIG_BONDING=y to this config: http://natisbad.org/nas-kernels/config-4.4.1.rn104

If you need any info, configs or logs I can provide them, not sure where to approach this and don't want to spam any ol' log on first post, so hopefully if you know what I need to provide you, someone can help diagnose this.