Re: [Xen-devel] Xen watchdog?

[Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I took a brief look at it. It was kind of big, with no great justification.
> I would have written a simple little user daemon for kicking the watchdog
> directly, rather than add extra stuff in our Linux kernel. But perhaps the
> latter is the 'proper' way? If so, the driver probably needs review on
> lkml.

It's the Linux Way - a userspace app wouldn't work, since it wouldn't be able 
to export the /dev/watchdog device node that HA infrastructure needs.

To be honest, IIRC, it seemed to me like most watchdog drivers in Linux could 
share more common code and then all be a decent bit smaller - something I 
could look at if the Linux folks are interested but wasn't on my todo list at 
the time.

A fair bit of the bulk in the rest of the code was in making the dom0 tools be 
a bit more aware of the watchdog state.  This was needed to support features 
such as the "watchdog initiated reboot" flag, but isn't strictly needed for 
basic functionality.  I can trim this bit out, at least for an initial merge, 
but there may be other stuff it'd be helpful to hook in here.

> Either way, I think the hypervisor interface should support multiple
> entities per guest trying to set up a watchdog timer. Even if just so that
> entities that lose the race get -EBUSY. This would make it safer to use
> without a single controlling entity in the guest kernel.

Hmmm.  I could do something like that, certainly.  The model I was following 
was that of hardware - I'm not sure what a physical watchdog card would do 
with multiple controlling entities but I doubt it'd be pretty.  As we're in 
the hypervisor, we've got more smarts available to us though, so a bit of 
opaque state to identify a "watchdog handle" should be trivial to add.  I 
wonder if there are any potential users this sort of behaviour, though - 
maybe Richard would comment here?

The only significant feature I'd want to add before merge is support for 
suspend / resume - that should be fairly simple to add, though.

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Dave: Just a question. What use is a unicyle with no seat?  And no pedals!
Mark: To answer a question with a question: What use is a skateboard?
Dave: Skateboards have wheels.
Mark: My wheel has a wheel!

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