NAME
watchdog
—
hardware and software
watchdog
SYNOPSIS
#include
<sys/watchdog.h>
DESCRIPTION
Thewatchdog
facility is used for controlling hardware
and software watchdogs.
The device /dev/fido responds to a single
ioctl(2) call, WDIOCPATPAT
. It takes a single
argument which represents a timeout value specified as a power of two
nanoseconds, or-ed with a flag selecting active or passive control of the
watchdog.
WD_ACTIVE
indicates that the
watchdog
will be kept from timing out from userland,
for instance by the
watchdogd(8) daemon. WD_PASSIVE
indicates that the watchdog
will be kept from timing
out from the kernel.
The ioctl(2) call will return success if just one of the available watchdog(9) implementations supports setting the timeout to the specified timeout. This means that at least one watchdog is armed. If the call fails, for instance if none of watchdog(9) implementations support the timeout length, all watchdogs are disabled and must be explicitly re-enabled.
To disable the watchdogs pass WD_TO_NEVER
.
If disarming the watchdog(s) failed an error is returned. The watchdog might
still be armed!
RETURN VALUES
The ioctl returns zero on success and non-zero on failure.
- [
EOPNOTSUPP
] - No watchdog present in the kernel or none of the watchdogs supports the requested timeout value (timeout value other than 0).
- [
EOPNOTSUPP
] - Watchdog could not be disabled (timeout value of 0).
- [
EINVAL
] - Invalid flag combination passed.
EXAMPLES
#include <paths.h> #include <sys/watchdog.h> #define WDPATH "/dev/" _PATH_WATCHDOG int wdfd = -1; static void wd_init(void) { wdfd = open(WDPATH, O_RDWR); if (wdfd == -1) err(1, WDPATH); } static void wd_reset(u_int timeout) { if (ioctl(wdfd, WDIOCPATPAT, &timeout) == -1) err(1, "WDIOCPATPAT"); } /* in main() */ wd_init(); wd_reset(WD_ACTIVE|WD_TO_8SEC); /* potential freeze point */ wd_reset(WD_TO_NEVER);
Enables a watchdog to recover from a potentially freezing piece of code.
options SW_WATCHDOG
in your kernel config adds a software watchdog in the kernel, dropping to KDB or panic-ing when firing.
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
The watchdog
code first appeared in
FreeBSD 5.1.
AUTHORS
The watchdog
facility was written by
Poul-Henning Kamp
<phk@FreeBSD.org>. The
software watchdog code and this manual page were written by
Sean Kelly
<smkelly@FreeBSD.org>.
Some contributions were made by Jeff Roberson
<jeff@FreeBSD.org>.
BUGS
The WD_PASSIVE
option has not yet been
implemented.