[systemd-devel] [Feature Request] GET before SET watchdog timeout setting on IPMI compatible hardware

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 11.09.12 11:34, Charles_Rose at Dell.com (Charles_Rose at Dell.com) wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> IPMI watchdog hardware on servers can be configured outside the /dev/watchdog interface[1].
> 
> It would be beneficial if systemd can first get the current timeout value (WDIOC_GETTIMEOUT), if not
> set, only then set it to RuntimeWatchdogSec. This would ensure that timeout values set via other
> configuration mechanisms still hold good and the system admin does not have to duplicate the timeout
> values in /etc/systemd/system.conf (especially for large number of systems, remotely). See bugzilla
> report[2] for details.
> 
> If there are other methods to reduce the number of configuration options that the system admin has
> to deal with, do share.
> 
> [1] http://openipmi.sourceforge.net/IPMI.txt
> [2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54712

Hmm, so how is this supposed to work in detail? It is still systemd
which shall ping the watchdog device in any case? Right now systemd does
not touch the watchdog device at all by default, people have to
explicitly configure an interval before systemd does anything with
it.

We could of course extend the current "RuntimeWatchdogSec=" setting to
accept an additional value of "auto" or so, which would enable systemd's
watchdog usage but cause it to reuse the default interval if one is
set. But I do wonder what this would be good for given that people would
still have to set this value explicitly, since we'd continue to default
watchdog usage to off -- and what happens if somebody sets the interval
in the firmware but systemd is not configured to ping the hw? If that
happens than the system will reboot automatically shortly after boot?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.