> | A common recovery mechanism in embedded systems is a watchdog timer, > | which is a hardware device that must be poked by the software every > | so often (e.g. by writing to some register). If too long an interval > | goes by without a poke, the WDT hard-resets the cpu. Normally the > | software would poke the WDT from its normal periodic timing routine. > | A loop like you describe would stop the timing routine from running, > | eventually resulting in a reset. > > *grin* - Yes of course - if the WDT was enabled - its something that I > have not seen on PC's yet...
The intel 810 chipset (and all after that) has a builtin watchdog timer - unfortunetally on some motherboards it's disabled (I guess in the BIOS). How do I know that? Once I got Linux installed on a new machine.... and although the install went without a problem, after the first boot the machine would reboot on exactly 2 minutes. After a bit of poking around I found that hotplug detected the WDT support and loaded the driver for it (i8xx_tco), and it seems the WDT chip was set to start ticking right away after the driver poked it. -- damjan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
