[OpenIndiana-discuss] How is this possible?

[Reginald Beardsley]

I have a pair of almost identical Z400s. (In total I have 4.) One has 4x 2 GB DIMMs (#3)  and the other has 2x 8 GB DIMMs (#4) .  Both have Quadro FX 1800 cards and trayless SATA bays.  Both are connected to the monitor through an 8 port KVM switch.

Hipster 2020.10 was installed on system #3.  The monitor was recognized and configured properly as 1600x1200 using the 340.108 driver.   If I move the disk to #4 the nVIDIA driver didn't recognize the monitor or the resolution, set 1024x768 and would not allow me to set it to 1600x1200.

I  moved the KVM switch port for #4  to #3 and rebooted 2020.10 on #3.  It behaves as expected, recognizes the Samsung Monitor and the correct resolution.

After I installed the 2x 8 GB DIMMs S10 u8 kernel panicked on a null pointer dereference, so I moved the 2020.10 disk to system #4 and ran it for several days to see if fmd would log ECC errors on the DIMMs.  fmdump -eV reports the log file is empty after 3 days.  I don't know what whether fmd in u8 logs ECC errors as I've never seen any, though I have seen occasional ECC errors on system #2 which is running 2017.10

This morning  I put the S10 u8 disks back in the system, booted and started scrubs at which point it immediately kernel panicked.  I rebooted in single user mode.  Both the root pool 3 way mirror and the RAIDZ1 export pool scrubs completed with no errors.

The 3 disks forming the 2 pools were in a 6 DIMM slot Z400 (#1).  That MB appears to have a failing SATA controller as it logged so many sector R/W errors it rebooted.  I replaced the suspect disk with a new drive of the same make, model and vintage.  The errors continued so I switched the  u8 disks to #4.  A subsequent test of the drive that was reported bad showed no errors after a 4 hr scan using the BIOS test.

After verifying that 2020.10 worked properly in #3, I moved the disk back to #4.  This time it came up at 960x540!  I changed out the video with the card from #1 and again it came up in 960x540. I then moved the video card from #3 to #4.  Again, 960x540.  I reset the BIOS to factory defaults, changed the things (e.g AHCI) I knew had to be changed.  Again.  Same behavior.

If I boot the 2020.10 Live Image on #3 it's 1600x1200.  On #4 it's 1024x768.  I tried the video card in the other PCIe slot.  Same result.

I'm completely baffled.    I've never seen anything like this.

Reg