This is the watchdog package for Fedora.  It implements a userspace
daemon which periodically pings (usually hardware) to tell the
hardware that the machine is alive.  If the hardware times out without
receiving a ping, it assumes userspace is dead and reboots the
machine.

There are several major classes of watchdog available:

 - watchdog hardware implementing the Linux /dev/watchdog API

     * drivers in /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/watchdog/
     * http://lxr.linux.no/linux/Documentation/watchdog/watchdog-api.txt

 - softdog

     * software watchdog (just runs inside the kernel)
     * implements the Linux /dev/watchdog API
     * won't help you if the kernel fails (obvious, right?)

 - IPMI

     * a heavyweight standard for all things server-management
     * separate Linux driver
     * ipmitool to control it
     * see README.watchdog.ipmi for how to use this daemon together
       with IPMI

You can also use watchdogs inside recent QEMU/KVM virtual machines.
When running qemu, specify "-watchdog i6300esb" on the qemu command
line (or use libvirt).  Inside the guest, the i6300esb watchdog driver
should automatically load and provide you with a Linux /dev/watchdog-
compatible API.

	- Richard W.M. Jones (rjones@redhat.com) 2009-02-26