What is correct way to enable watchdog?

[Patrick Lamaizière]

Le Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:01:13 -0800 (PST),
Peter Steele <psteele at maxiscale.com>:

> > If -e cmd is not specified, the daemon will 
> > perform a trivial file system check instead. 
> 
> So -e has to be provided for the system to reboot?

No, if -e is provided, watchdogd execute the command 'cmd', if the
command succeed it resets and restarts the watchdog.

Without -e, watchdogd tests a stat("/etc",xxx) syscall.

See http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200406/watchdog.html

> >This smells more like a bug in watchdog. If that's the case, the
> >crash dumps should point right at it, at which point I'd take it to
> >freebsd-stable or -current, whichever applies to the OS version. 
> 
> Okay, we'll enable dumpdev/dumpdir and see what we get. 

If the watchdog is a hardware watchdog, you will not get any log or
crash dump, just a hard reset.

Which watchdog are you using?

Regards.