Re: why are the watchdog drivers blacklisted?
On Fri, 05 Feb 2010, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Feb 05, Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> wrote:
> > do not remember any more details. This was discovered a few years
> > ago, and I hope that crazy driver has been fixed in the mean time.
> So it looks like this *is* my fault, in my defense I can only say that I
> got bad advice from the kernel maintainers...
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=249600
>
> I cannot even find anymore this i810_tco/i8xx_tco module, so in the next
> udev upload I will remove all watchdog drivers from the blacklist and
> maybe add back the ones reported as broken.
It got renamed to wdt_tco, I think, and it will hard-hang a lot of thinkpads
if it ever triggers, for example: the SMBIOS can't handle it.
Anyway, if for any reason we load a watchdog driver, AND any of the watchdog
userspace packages by mistake, we can cause data loss.
For example: someone decided that once every 10s was a good default watchdog
pat, which is incorrect. If the platform or the kernel driver defaults to
10s or less, bad things happen. I have seen this happen on Lenny.
I.e. even if the kernel and platform cooperates, we don't have done our work
carefully enough yet to risk these things getting enabled without local
setup.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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