IT8720F watchdog

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

http://www.ite.com.tw/EN/products_more.aspx?CategoryID=3&ID=5,69

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchdog_timer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_I/O