watchdog end-user interface

[Andriy Gapon]

On 19/10/2016 14:18, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> --------
> In message <ec3dfab5-c3bc-e9e5-181e-8c2704f60acd at FreeBSD.org>, Andriy Gapon wri
> tes:
> 
>> I want to question if those options really belong to watchdogd.
>> When a watchdog timer expires that results in a system-wide action (like a
>> system reset).  To me, that implies that there should be a single system-wide
>> configuration point.  And I am not sure that the daemon is the best choice for it.
> 
> The reason I originally put it in a daemon, was to have the watchdog
> implicitly test the kernels ability to schedule trivial processes.
> 
> It used to be, and may still be so that, there are deadlocks where
> the kernel was twiddling its thumbs but userland did not progress.
> Typical triggers for this are disk-I/O errors, corrupt filesystems,
> memory overcommit etc.
> 
> A kernel-only watchdog patter would not trigger in that case.

I addressed this further down my post.
Just in case, I think that watchdogd should do the pat-pats as it does now.
But that's different from setting the timeout.

-- 
Andriy Gapon