Re: Running Linux on Linus

[ralf@uni-koblenz.de]

On Sat, Jun 20, 1998 at 10:58:04PM -0400, LetherGlov@aol.com wrote:

>        In response to the ideas floating around about running Linux on Linus,
> I think that before you give Bob Mende and William Earl tons of work
> configuring it (and rebooting), that If I understand things correctly it is a
> good idea to enable the Watchdog features of the Dallas 1386 clock, so that if
> there are any kernel panics or troubles or whatever may occur that the
> watchdog would automatically restart linus in the event that the kernel was
> no-longer updating the timer.

Talking about the Dallas chip, we still don't have proper Dallas RTC
support (/proc/rtc rsp. /dev/rtc), so we currently cannot even adjust
the rtc under Linux.  Definately a must before we switch.

I had my headaches about the stability of the kernel - I should probably 
given them up.  I'm running crashless and hickupless since two weeks
even though I've been trying hard to stress the system and trigger the
one known problem causing a bus error.  Probably time for wider testing.

> If I am just completely off on the whole general concept of a Watchdog please
> tell me, but I think that(if I'm right) it might be a good idea for everybody
> to have that feature available to them :-) The documentation that I was
> reading at Dallas' website implied that the only thing involved was to have
> the clock stuff to reset, or update, the reset time of the timer every xxx
> seconds to prevent it from restarting an out-of-control processor.

The idea of a software watchdog is good, it's somewhere on the bottom of
my to do list since quite some time.

  Ralf