RE: [Freeipmi-devel] Re: [Freeipmi-users] bmc-watchdog and the OSwatchdog in BIOS

[Cress, Andrew R]

The BIOS Fault-Resilient-Boot timer, the BIOS OS-Watchdog timer, and the IPMI watchdog timer, are all using the same physical timer, but cover different phases of boot. 

  BIOS FRB covers power-on through POST,

  BIOS OS covers POST to OS running,

  IPMI covers while the OS is running. 

Each of should set up the timer when it initializes. 

 

Andy

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From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Won De Erick
Sent: Sunday, August 10, 2008 9:34 PM
To: address@hidden
Cc: address@hidden; address@hidden
Subject: [Freeipmi-devel] Re: [Freeipmi-users] bmc-watchdog and the OSwatchdog in BIOS

Hi Al,

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I think this is a protection to the BIOS (not normally writable) so as not to let malicious progs to easily change the settings.

Thanks,

Won

----- Original Message ----
From: Al Chu <address@hidden>
To: Won De Erick <address@hidden>
Cc: address@hidden; address@hidden
Sent: Sunday, August 10, 2008 8:49:45 PM
Subject: Re: [Freeipmi-users] bmc-watchdog and the OS watchdog in BIOS

Hey Won,

I cannot speak for your particular hardware.  I'm not sure if there is a
separate independent hardware watchdog. 

I can say, the settings you make with bmc-watchdog may not survive
across a system reboot.  It's very possible that after a system reboot,
the BIOS resets the watchdog values back to the system default, no
matter what you previously configured.

Al

On Fri, 2008-08-08 at 18:11 -0700, Won De Erick wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> We've tried installing the bmc-watchdog utility in IBMx343 running FreeBSD. We've found out that it can interact with the built-in management processor. When the timer was set to 1 minute using bmc-watchdog -s command, the system restarted after the specified time. But this setting did not change the OS watchdog timer that was pre-configured using the BIOS utility. How are these two differ from each other?
>
> I've learned some known issues on using bmc-watchdog as specified in the following:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/freeipmi/manpages/man8/bmc-watchdog.8.html
>
> Setting the watchdog timer on the user space is incomparable with an independent hardware watchdog (is this the case of the built-in management processor on the IBM x343 box?). Hope to receive some lights from all.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Won
>
>
>     
> _______________________________________________
> Freeipmi-users mailing list
> address@hidden
> http:// lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freeipmi-users
>
--
Albert Chu
address@hidden
925-422-5311
Computer Scientist
High Performance Systems Division
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory