On Tuesday 11 September 2012 06:46 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote: > On Tue, 11.09.12 11:34, [email protected] ([email protected]) 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?
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 > > Lennart > _______________________________________________ systemd-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
