Enabling watchdog

[rihad]

On 05/14/2010 04:13 AM, Doug Ambrisko wrote:
> rihad writes:
> | Hi, I'm thinking of enabling the watchdog on our Dell PowerEdge 2950 /
> | FreeBSD 8.0 amd64, so that it reboots the machine in case of lockups.
> | Right now it doesn't work:
> |
> | # watchdog
> | watchdog: patting the dog: Operation not supported
> | #
> | Looking through the kernel configuration I found two relevant settings:
> | In /sys/conf/NOTES:
> | #
> | # Add software watchdog routines.
> | #
> | options SW_WATCHDOG
> |
> | and in /sys/amd64/conf/NOTES:
> | #
> | # Watchdog routines.
> | #
> | options MP_WATCHDOG
> |
> | Which of them should I rebuild the kernel with? BTW, the existing kernel
> | is built with the default "options SCHED_ULE" to make good use of
> | multiple CPUs, does watchdog work with it?
>
> If no one has said yet, kldload ipmi then run watchdogd.  ... or compile
> it into the kernel.  This will enable the IPMI HW watchdog.  If it triggers,
> it will appear in the IPMI SEL (ipmitool sel list).
>
Thanks. So did I understand it right that I should first install 
sysutils/ipmitool, then start polling "ipmitool sel list" in a shell 
script from a cron job run once a minute, and reboot in case IPMI 
triggers? But if it's a kernel lockup, none of the user level code might 
run at all. Any way to fall back to a hard and fast kernel level machine 
reset?