[oi-dev] [developer] BMC driver on Illumos

[Paul B. Henson]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 12:12:22PM -0700, Garrett D'Amore wrote:

> Now I've not looked at Linux and how it uses watchdogs… but I've
> experience with a few different embedded systems, and the above

Linux typically makes available a /dev/watchdog device, which is an
interface to either a hardware watchdog or a software based watchdog. A
daemon can open the device and enable the watchdog, and if it does not
update the device on whatever schedule was configured, the watchdog
takes whatever action the underlying driver supports (we use the IPMI
watchdog on our linux systems, and have it configured to do a hard
reset).

The typical userspace watchdog is "watchdog"
(http://linux.die.net/man/8/watchdog) and it supports checking a variety
of things built-in, as well as the ability to run arbitrary user check
scripts. If any of the checks fail, it doesn't tickle the device, and
the watchdog triggers.

It would be sweet if illumos supported a generic watchdog framework like
this and had a driver for the standard ipmi watchdog :).