Hi, Short selfintro for the watchdog people: I'm a FOSS developer / enthusiast for close to 15 years now. I've written Linux kernel drivers for a ton of webcams and various hwmon IC's. Three of the hwmon drivers I maintain are IC's which also include a watchdog part in their hwmon solution. This is a resend of a series of watchdog_dev patches which I initially send on Sep 12 2011: http://lists.lm-sensors.org/pipermail/lm-sensors/2011-September/033707.html And which unfortunately has seen 0 reviews / feedback since then. This resend is re-based on top of v3.3-rc7 Currently the hwmon drivers I maintain are implementing the watchdog API all by themselves, I would very much like to switch them over to watchdog_dev to remove a lot of code duplication, but there currently are 2 things stopping me from moving them over: 1) The driver core only works for 1 watchdog, but both my fschmd and my sch5636 test systems also have an iTCO watchdog and that tends to load first. Thus when writing the fschmd watchdog code I made it support loading either on the default watchdog minor, or on one of the additional reserved watchdog minors (212-215). The first patch in this series adds support for this to the watchdog timer driver core (which was quite straightforward to add). 2) Most Linux drivers use dynamically allocated memory for the driver data, which gets allocated on calling the probe function and released on driver unbind. This means that merely locking the module containing the driver as long as /dev/watchdog is open is not sufficient, since the driver can still be unbound. The second patch in this series fixes this. Note that the 2nd issue is also hit by the recently posted: "[PATCH V2 00/22] watchdog: ARM watchdogs: sp805 & mpcore updates & fixes" patch series which convert the mpcore_wdt driver to watchdog_dev, doing an unbind between the platform driver and the platform dev there from sysfs while an app holds the /dev/watchdog file open will make file->private_data for that file handle point to freed memory! Once this series is upstream I'll also write a patches to convert all my hwmon IC with watchdog watchdog driver parts to watchdog_dev. Regards, Hans _______________________________________________ lm-sensors mailing list lm-sensors@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.lm-sensors.org/mailman/listinfo/lm-sensors
