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Mastering Linux Device Driver Development
book

Mastering Linux Device Driver Development

by John Madieu
January 2021
Intermediate to advanced
646 pages
13h 48m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Mastering Linux Device Driver Development

Chapter 13: Watchdog Device Drivers

A watchdog is a hardware (sometimes emulated by software) device intended to ensure the availability of a given system. It helps make sure that the system always reboots upon a critical hang, thus allowing to monitor the "normal" behavior of the system.

Whether it is hardware-based or emulated by software, the watchdog is, most of the time, nothing but a timer initialized with a reasonable timeout that should be periodically refreshed by software running on the monitored system. If for any reason the software stops/fails at refreshing the timer (and has not explicitly shut it down) before it expires (it runs to timeout), this will trigger a (hardware) reset of the whole system (the computer, in our case). ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781789342048