Driver vor Watchdog

[Martin Blapp]

Hi,

>I'm currently developing a driver for this watchdog-card:
>  'Antrax WatchCard PCI' -> http://www.antrax.de/ (German)
>(btw. Antrax != Anthrax)
>
>And now I have some questions:
>
>- Should I develop the driver for 4.x or 5.x or both?

Cool !

That depends where do you plan to use it. I suppose that
you only develop a 5.x version if you don't need to run it
yourself on 4.x

>- What would be the preferred method for configuring and handling the card?
>  a: using a kernel module for triggering and sysctl for config?
>     (this method is preferred by me)
>  b: a daemon that handles all of that?
>  c: a tool which could be run by cron or the like?

a of course. b and c don't make any sense, only for debugging purposes
of the saved memory, see below.

>- Are there any quirks I should take care of?
>
> The card uses a PITA-2 (PSB4610) from Infineon as PCI-Controller and has an
> optional sensor for system temperature.

>From the documentation:

># the last state of the main program (kernel) before the watchdog card
>   triggered is saved on the card and can be read after booting. (With this
>   help you can find out the source of the deadlock or crash of your system)
>
># the last reset-reason ('normal' power-ON, manual reset due a user- or
>  failure reset, a reset triggered trough the watchdog card) can be read out.

A tool to debug these would be neat here ... Or a sysctl to read the latter ...

Martin

Martin Blapp, <mb at imp.ch> <mbr at FreeBSD.org>
------------------------------------------------------------------
ImproWare AG, UNIXSP & ISP, Zurlindenstrasse 29, 4133 Pratteln, CH
Phone: +41 61 826 93 00 Fax: +41 61 826 93 01
PGP: <finger -l mbr at freebsd.org>
PGP Fingerprint: B434 53FC C87C FE7B 0A18 B84C 8686 EF22 D300 551E
------------------------------------------------------------------