There has been some fusor research going on for decades. The issue that killed that direction of fusion research was ultimately that the electrons do not behave as the initial simple models suggested and in the real world the power loss from the fast electrons is just too big for any reasonably sized device to allow for self sustaining fusion.

you mean turing complete?

this is extra tricky because they did not specify the exact kernel. mainline could be any of the kernels tagged as stable that you can build from linus’ git tree. i know that in the past you could run a mainline linux on intel 368 chips but today you probably can not because official support was dropped a while ago.

could you run something like sudo lsblk -o+MODEL and note down the model for the drives? i kind of suspect that the HBA you are using is still doing some abstraction and is not in IT mode. the duplication could come from connecting two SAS cables to the same backplane, thus creating a sort of double image of the enclosure. this is usually handled and hidden by the HBA though if it is configured correctly.

pls also check that you are in fact using the correct ports on the enclosure. if you are not building a SAN only the “A” ports are supposed to be used and the “B” ports should be unused/free.

just a bunch of individuals drives

that is literally what JBOD means so congratulations you already have one. a classical RAID would show up as a single drive.

Initiator-target (IT) mode enables creating a JBOD with zfs vdevs on it. You can have the zfs vdevs in raidz configuration (which would give you the same drive redundancy as a hardware raid, with raidz1 performing similar to RAID5)

zfs is commonly used with a JBOD configuration on a raid controller but you can also use any other kind of controller as long as the individual drives can be written to. examples for this would be NVMe drives directly attached to the PCIe bus or normal SATA controllers. This is more a performance optimization than an issue with compatibility.