Re: [PATCH][RFC] Proposal for a new watchdog interface using sysfs

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On Thu, 13 Feb 2003 15:58:17 MST, Matt Porter said:

> Yes, and on embedded SoC devices we have watchdog facilities sitting
> on an internal chip bus.  It would be nice to find access points in
> a uniform place on any Linux system.  i.e. PCI watchdog on my x86 desktop
> is in the same place as the on-chip watchdog on my PPC44x system.
> 
> IMHO, anything else would be a logical step backwards from accessing
> /dev/watchdog across platforms.

I admit not having thoroughly read the source to check - is the userspace API
for accessing  all these chips fairly uniform and rational, so that a user
program can be reasonably sure that if stat("/dev/watchdog") returns zero, that
it knows how to deal with it?  Or are they all sufficiently close to the "keep
reloading a countdown timer from userspace, and if it ever doesn't get reloaded,
kick the kernel in the seat of the pants" programming model?  Of course, even
a disagreement on the units of the timer could be bad - a seconds/milliseconds
clash could result is a *real* fast lack-of-joy situation.. ;)

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