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

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 13.09.12 16:53, Charles_Rose at Dell.com (Charles_Rose at Dell.com) wrote:

> > 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?
> 
> Configuring timeout in firmware does not imply 'start timer'. Timer is started only on open() from
> OS [1].
> 
> 'auto' option sounds like a reasonable compromise to reduce number of steps necessary to configure
> IPMI watchdog hw.
> 
>    0: disable watchdog
>    <non-zero-positive>: enable watchdog and set this timeout.
>    'auto': I want watchdog functionality, but not sure what the timeout is/should
> be/take it from the driver. Flow: open(); GETTIMEOUT; if (!timeout) SETTIMEOUT
> 
> For the long term, if we can get ipmi_watchdog to autoload on hw detect, we can
> have users set RuntimeWatchdogSec=auto or set a timeout value.
> 
> [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54712#c2

Added an item to the TODO list now for this.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.