Re: [PATCH 0/11 v3] Generic Watchdog Timer Driver

From: Wim Van Sebroeck
Date: Fri Jul 22 2011 - 17:31:56 EST


Hi Arnaud,

> I had the occasion to have a look to the code in -next this week, so
> my comment will be based on this.
>
> One thing which looked too constrained to me, is that the framework
> only supports a for a single watchdog. While this is fine for most
> board, I have an x86 based device which has 2 watchdog. This might be
> silly, but that's what the hardware provide. The current wartchdog
> framework would fail to adapt to this board. Moreover, one might think
> to provide interface to fail-to-wire NICs device on top of the
> watchdog framework. So at the end, it might be needed to be able to
> register an infinite amount of watchdog. Though, I am not sure how it
> would presented to userland, maybe something ala /dev/watchdog/[0-N].

This is what I said allready in the past:
1) we need the framework to get rid of the existing common code first.
2) next step is to extend the framework to support multiple watchdogs.
(via a sysfs like interface).

And we are seeing other interesting functionality that might also be added
to the framework. So still a lot of work to do :-).

PS: this comment was removed as a cleanup from Beta code to code that
is ready to be included in mainline:
+ /* The future version will have to manage a list of all
+ * registered watchdog devices. To start we will only
+ * support 1 watchdog device via the /dev/watchdog interface */

Kind regards,
Wim.

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