[OpenIndiana-discuss] Revisiting a KVM switch issue

[Carl Brewer]

G'day,
A couple of years ago now (202109) I managed to break an install of OI 
Hipster on a reasonably modern desktop motherboard, when I tried to use 
a cheapy KVM switch on it once I put it into my data rack. The thing 
would not boot (or at least, I couldn't see it on the KVM switch and it 
didn't respond to SSH etc). It had been fine on my workbench with a 
screen plugged directly into the HDMI port on it. The box has an intel 
i5-10400F - which doesn't have graphics built in, and an NVidia 1030 PCI 
graphics card, with an HDMI and DVI port on it.

Anyway ..
I managed to get it to boot up with an HDMI "dummy" plugged into it, and 
haven't really looked at it since, it just sits in the rack with a few 
VirtualBox VM's running and it's happy. Every now and then I consider 
pkg updating it to the latest but get spooked by reports (and my own 
experience of late) of image-updates locking systems on reboot and 
needing to be backed out to come up.  So it just runs and will do so 
until I replace the hardware in a couple of years.  It never falters, 
Solaris post 2.x is, as we know, about as close to bombproof as it gets 
(I have, still in the shrinkwrap, a Solaris 2.0 release CD, not game to 
open it up in case it escapes into the wild ... the horror! I had to use 
Solaris 2.2 in production in the mid 90's, and it was -terrible-, it 
wasn't until 2.5.x that it was stable enough to be considered for real 
work. OMFG early SVR4 Solaris was garbage!)

carl at skaro:~$ uname -a
SunOS skaro 5.11 illumos-4f9241761d i86pc i386 i86pc

Every now and then I get a bee in my bonnet and I think I'd like to have 
a KVM switch on it and its sister next to it, but am concerned that it 
would break again.  I have a cheapy HDMI KVM switch, one of those 
passive ones that seem to be little more than a switch (less than a 
hundred bucks, it's not got much going on!). These simple, cheap ones 
used to work pretty well with VGA stuff, but some HDMI things get upset 
about them, including lightDM/Xorg on OI.

So I wonder what the problem was?

If there's nothing plugged in to the HDMI port, Lightdm panics and locks 
up the kernel, and the box needed a reconfigure of the BIOS(!) to get it 
going. I put it all in an email thread on this mailing list at the time. 
It was/is probably some bug in the NVidia driver, but that's a closed 
thing and we can't look into it, so it stays.

So I wonder, if I got a smarter KVM switch that does proper EDID stuff, 
would it work in the same sense as the HDMI dummy plug and the box would 
survive with a KVM switch attached? Would make occasional touching of 
the console a lot easier!

A decent one that mentions EDID in its doco is around $500 AUD or so for 
a two port'er so they're not cheap, anyone here used one and knows if it 
works?

Thank you,

Carl