Carol Hebert wrote: >On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 08:45 -0700, Doug Ambrisko wrote: > > >>Audet, Jean-Michel writes: >>| Are we OK if I patch IPMITool in the CVS. >> >>Patch it. There are probably some OS's that don't have it built into >>the driver. It won't conflict unless people try to do both at once. >>We might want to add a note that they should use the driver provided >>watchdog if available. >> >>Doug A. >> >> >> >Hi, > >I'd like to review this patch a bit further (and longer) before >committing it to CVS (oops, too late :-( . I personally have some >concerns about it and I also think it would be good to give others on >ipmitool-devel the chance to weigh in on it. > >The OpenIPMI driver currently provides an excellent in-band interface >for the watchdog. Additionally, there is an excellent watchdog daemon >(a project on sourceforge) which can be set up to be used as a hardware >watchdog with the OpenIPMI driver (actually, there are probably many >other suitable daemons as well that can be used with IPMI). > >Regarding out-of-band watchdog manipulation, of course it's not a good >idea for a remote machine to be made responsible for resetting a >watchdog timer on any another machine. > It depends on the capabilities of the overall machine (here, the watchdog is the only way to have reset/power controls), and the capabilities of the targetted board: there are switches on which I cannot put watchdog daemons, or SBCs with flashed linux systems on which I cannot install any smart daemon.
It also depends on the situations. A remote watchdog is meaningful for targets that must boot in a specified amount of time: you cannot bet that the remote diskless target boots correctly and is not stuck in a BIOS failure or in a linux boot failure. About the fact that a remote board should not overwrite a watchdog set locally, the code could be improved so that a "get watchdog" is done before any "set watchdog" to deduce if a watchdog is currently running (don't know if it can be deduced in any case, though). >One thing ipmitool does need (and has needed for awhile), I believe, is >a command to turn off the watchdog timer gracefully. AFAIK, this >functionality is currently only available in ipmitool via the raw >command interface. It appears to me that the set command in the patch >does not allow for a timer shutdown. I think there needs to be a >command interface or help-type/usage documentation on how to turn the >timer off. > > >Anyway, hope this is helpful and sparks (not flame-type sparks >hopefully ;-) more discussion. > > Feel free to drop the patch if you find it too dangerous or not complete/robust enough. If it is too dangerous (but I don't see why it is more dangerous than the ability to bridge a chassis power command) maybe a configure option like --with-watchdog could be added, so that the people/packagers wanting the feature would explicitely ask for it at compilation time. Regards, -- Benoît Guillon [EMAIL PROTECTED] TCT/3S tel. : 33 (0)4 98 16 33 90 THALES COMPUTERS ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Ipmitool-devel mailing list Ipmitool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ipmitool-devel
