This has been discussed before, and I've been working on it. I think this is the minimum that can be done to keep the IPMI watchdog functionality exactly the same and use the watchdog subsystem. The first patch is something that I thought might be a bug, and is not directly related to the changes. The IPMI watchdog has the following capabilities that need extensions to the watchdog subsystem: * The ability to provide read data on the device when a pretimeout occurs. * The ability to dynamically set the timeout and pretimeout with module parameters. * The ability to start the watchdog as soon as the driver starts. I have no idea if anyone is using the capabilities, but they are there, unfortunately. A patch later in the series adds the ability to modify the watchdog time on a reboot. This was specifically requested in the past, so I know it was at least used in the past. The IPMI watchdog driver can do this itself, but it's simple to add to the watchdog framework and gets rid of some redundant code. This leaves the driver code in the ipmi directory. After these changes it could be moved, but it doesn't matter much to me. Thanks, -corey
