i810 watchdog troubles (solved, but...)

[Hendrik Fuss <fuss-h@ulster.ac.uk>]

Hello there,

I've just installed sarge (testing) on a new Fujitsu-Siemens R610 Dual
Xeon workstation, but it took me quite a while to find out why the
machine would power cycle every two minutes *only* when running under a
2.6 kernel (kernel-image 2.6.6-1-686-smp). No problems with a 2.4
kernel.

I finally discovered it was the i810 watchdog timer on the motherboard,
that I hadn't been aware of previously. When the watchdog module was
loaded it probably started the timer and since there was no program that
wrote to /dev/watchdog the system would hard reset a minute later. The
module probably doesn't exist in the 2.4 kernel.

Installing the watchdog package didn't help. In addition I had to edit
the config file /etc/watchdog.conf and uncomment the line
"watchdog-device". After that the system was stable.

I still think there's something wrong with the way the watchdog driver
and daemon work, though. Why does the timer get started even though
there's no watchdog daemon writing to the /dev/watchdog device? I'm not
even sure the i8xx_tco module started the timer, though on startup it
would print this message:

i8xx TCO timer: initialized (0x1060). heartbeat=30 sec (nowayout=0)

cheers,
Hendrik

-- 
Hendrik Fuß <fuss-h@ulster.ac.uk>
University of Ulster