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