Hello, I hope my general questions about the watchdog package belong on this list.
1) Is it really the desired behavior that wd_keepalive is started in /etc/init.d/watchdog when the watchdog daemon is stopped? If the system shall be kept from rebooting due to terminating the watchdog process, does it not suffice to close /dev/watchdog as it is documented in the manual page? It makes sense if the kernel is compiled with CONFIG_WATCHDOG_NOWAYOUT but otherwise it does not. (The capabilities could be queried with the WDIOC_GETSUPPORT ioctl AFAIK.) From my point of view, when the system administrator explicitely sets CONFIG_WATCHDOG_NOWAYOUT or provides "nowayout" to the kernel module, he/she wants the system to reboot if something happens, including an accidental or intentional stop of the watchdog daemon. 2) The way the watchdog package currently works, it will not always reboot an unresponsive system. This is related to my comment on bug #499796. For example, when the system enters rc6 and watchdog is terminated by the init script, wd_keepalive will seemingly keep the system from rebooting even if the kernel hangs. Would't it be better to run the init script (stop watchdog but do not start wd_keepalive) just before calling reboot or halt? That way, the watchdog daemon will be able to trigger a reboot until the last moment. Unfortunately, there are some issues when the monitored event happens (e.g. process is killed in rc6 or hd is unmounted) more than 60s before the watchdog is terminated. Regards, Bastian -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201104141447.17091.bly...@zedat.fu-berlin.de
