Arch Linux

Sjoden

Member

From: WA

Registered: 2007-08-16

Posts: 380

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Possible bug with kernal/watchdog?

Last night, as root I ran

cat /dev/watchdog

and got an error message about invalid parameters(i think ), and a minute later my machine restarted in the middle of doing something. I meant to cat /dev/input/wacom, but I hit w and tabbed after /dev/ and catted watchdog instead.

I was confused as to why my machine rebooted, so I checked /var/log/kernel.log and saw

Feb 12 00:12:03 robot iTCO_wdt: Unexpected close, not stopping watchdog!

The next message in there was at 00:13:04, and was a BIOS/lowmem entry, so I'm guessing thats when the machine started to boot up again, since the message was the kernel version a second later.

Last edited by Sjoden (2009-02-12 21:12:39)

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pointone

Wiki Admin

From: Waterloo, ON

Registered: 2008-02-21

Posts: 379

Re: Possible bug with kernal/watchdog?

http://linux.die.net/man/8/watchdog

...or simply "man watchdog" should provide you with the answers you seek.

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