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