RFC: enhanced watchdog.

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

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In message <50FA3D36.4080709 at mu.org>, Alfred Perlstein writes:

>We at iX are trying to enhance the watchdog and we think some of the 
>changes may benefit the community as a whole.

The initial watchdog support was generalized from only two examples
and therefore quite crude.

I think your proposed improvements make good sense.

I will generally warn you not to make things too complex though,
it's important that the watchdog subsystem does not become a
cause of failure on its own.

Having a kernel thread which tries to get attention some delta-T
before the hardware watchdog is supposed to kick in, also sounds
like a good idea, but its information is going to be quite unreliable.

One wish I have heard, was to be able to use multiple WD's separately,
the current API sort of treats them as a redundant pool.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
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