Reducing the need to compile a custom kernel

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 04:25:21PM -0700, Ian Lepore wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-02-10 at 15:10 -0800, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> > * Addition: device ichwd
> >   - Note: We do not use features of this driver given known problems
> >     with the watchdog firing during ddb> and similar environments.  I
> >     have no idea if this has been fixed, but I do remember it being
> >     confirmed as a problem.
> 
> It used to be that "watchdog 0" in ddb disabled the watchdog, then when
> we upgraded to 8.2 that stopped working.  One day I discovered (via
> typo) that now just "watchdog" without a numeric parm disables it.  I'm
> not positive that applies to the ichwd but it works that way for the
> hardware watchdog on our arm platforms.

This won't work for us.  This requires manual intervention.  When we
have a machine that panic's, we want it sitting at a ddb> prompt
indefinitely until an admin gets to it to find out what happened.  There
may be some way to automatically run ddb commands when ddb is induced,
but I haven't dug into it yet.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                     http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                 Mountain View, CA, US |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.             PGP 4BD6C0CB |