Hi,

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 6:12 PM, Deepak Pandian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> > First the non-technical babble:
> > You application crashes once in a while? An ominous sign indeed. Why
> don't
> > you fix this first? Watchdog timers are only when your application
> crashes
> > unexpectedly.
>
> Sure. I have found the issue and I have fixed it. It was a Heisenbug.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug#Heisenbugs
>
> It was due to enormous amount of unlinks without closing the fds
> associated with the file.
>

Ah! Good for you! Way to go.


>
> > Technical:
> > Are you able to verify that the watchdog daemon is running? If
> /dev/watchdog
> > present and accessible?
>
> /dev/watchdog is present.  but i dont see any watchdog process running
> in the system.
>

The watchdog device is a softdog. A daemon needs to be running.


>
>  Can you manually verify that the system reboots if
> > the watchdog's timer is not refreshed? Let us initially rule-out issues
> in
> > the watchdog driver in the kernel.
>
> Sorry I am forced to ask you back how to do this.How to refresh the
> timer from our application. I am using busybox 1.6.1
>
> One more doubt.. whether the device shown in /dev/watchdog is a
> softdog or hardware watchdog.
>
> Any pointers towards these documentation is most welcome. I am not
> able to locate them.
>

I'm not too sure if BusyBox provides a watchdog daemon binary option. But I
guess it would, given that BusyBox is used so much in embedded systems these
days. The concept of the watchdog daemon is pretty simple. It has a config
file /etc/watchdog.conf where you can specify various tests. If one of those
tests fail, it will stop writing to /dev/watchdog causing the system to
reboot.

These included tests for memory, number of processes in the process table,
test for a particular process, etc. A simple way to get this up and running
on your target is to initially install the "watchdog" package on your host.
Then simple do a "man watchdog" and "man watchdog.conf" to read up on the
various options this daemon provides.

HTH,
-- 
Shuveb Hussain
B I N A R Y K A R M A
Chennai, India.
Phone : +91 44-64621656
Mobile: +91 98403-80386
http://www.binarykarma.com
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