Running Linux on Linus

Running Linux on Linus

[LetherGlov]

Hi,

       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.

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.


Thanks,
Robbie Stone

P.S. In /src/web the permissions of the *.in files were changed somehow to
root-only editing, it would be nice if you could enable the vip user group to
have write-permissions as well, since there are a couple of things off in the
documentation.

P.P.S--To Alex, there doesn't appear anywhere in the web-pages a link into the
manhattan/rpm2html hierarchy, I don't know If I missed the link, or if your
just not done, but it isn't existent at the moment. And in the rpm2html
generated files there is no page at the other end of the Help hyperlink on the
top left-corner of the menu in the generated pages.

P.P.P.S--to Mende, the root partition on Linus is _very_ close to being full,
perhaps a clean up of the unnessesary programs/files is in order, otherwise
the maintenance and addition of space on the /src partition is very nice.

Good Night 8-)

Re: Running Linux on Linus

[ralf]

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