Enabling watchdog

[Doug Ambrisko]

rihad writes:
| 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?

Nope, when you load the ipmi driver it provides a HW watchdog via ipmi
and works with watchdogd.  Now if you want to know if your machines 
rebooted due to the watchdog then check the ipmi sel for the watchdog 
event.

Doug A.