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

[Matt Porter <porter@cox.net>]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 04:12:28PM -0500, Scott Murray wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Patrick Mochel wrote:
> > 
> [snip]
> > Create a watchdog timer class. That will contain all watchdog timers, no 
> > matter what bus they are on. 
> > 
> > I apologize for leading you astray with suggesting you treat them as 
> > system devices; I was under the assumption they were more important. :)
> > They should always be in the most accurate place in the tree. Don't worry 
> > about what the user sees; consistency and accuracy are more important..
> 
> I like this idea, since it means my init scripts wouldn't have to dig 
> around looking for watchdog directories/files on various flavours of cPCI 
> CPU cards. :)

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.

Regards,
-- 
Matt Porter
porter@cox.net
This is Linux Country. On a quiet night, you can hear Windows reboot.