I am currently working on the bcm47xx_wdt driver and it uses some soft timer, because some devices have a max timeout of 2 seconds. The kernel timer pings the hardware watchdog every second and the userspace just have to ping the driver e.g. every 30 seconds. I saw that 12 drivers in drivers/watchdog/ are currently calling setup_timer and are probably doing something similar to the bcm47xx_wdt driver. I think this soft timer in between should go into watchdog_core.c. A driver should set some option in struct watchdog_device to request a soft timer in between and set the maximum timeout of the hardware timer and then gets pinged e.g. every second or even more often and watchdog_core.c abstracts that the user space just have to ping the kernel e.g. every 30 seconds. This would just work for drivers using struct watchdog_ops, but could make some driver smaller. This could also be activated if a driver sets a maximum timeout of e.g. less then 5 seconds, then the interface does not have to be changes. Hauke -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-watchdog" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
