Watchdog timers are indispensible elements of remote, autonomous systems. A modern desktop motherboard may have such a device, typically integrated into the Super I/O controller. In the followings, you can read the setup procedure of the watchdog part of the ITE Tech. Inc. IT8720F chip under Linux.
# modprobe it87_wdt # dmesg | tail ... IT87 WDT: Chip IT8720 revision 8 initialized. timeout=60 sec (nowayout=0 testmode=0 exclusive=1 nogameport=0)
The kernel recognized the watchdog device, and then the watchdog daemon can be set.
# sudo apt-get install watchdog # sed 's/run_watchdog=./run_watchdog=1/' /etc/default/watchdog # sed 's/watchdog_module=.*/watchdog_module="iat87_wdt"/' /etc/default/watchdog # sed 's/^ *#* *watchdog-device.*/watchdog-device = \/dev\/watchdog/' /etc/watchdog.conf # service watchdog restart
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