"Damjan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
| > | 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. Yikes! "some poking around" - with two minutes to do it in - must have scarred you for life! - Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
