[Soekris] "Lockup" update

[Iustin Pop]

On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 02:17:44PM +0200, Richard Homonnai wrote:
> That is exactly what I meant. The name is quite a bad choose, but this is 
> definitely it. It says "if /dev/wdX is not open, don't start (or halt if 
> already started) the watchdog timer." So, if you are in boot 
> process, /dev/wd0 just sits there. And when watchdogd gets started, then it 
> is open. So this option ist what helped me, and there were no false negatives 
> yet :)

You're not exactly right. This config setting has not relation to what
happens before /dev/wdX is first opened. It has effect only on two
cases:
  - process closes /dev/wdX
  - system is being shutdown

When the module (or builtin, it doesn't matter) is first initialised,
the physical device is initialised and immediately disabled, *no matter
what the value of WATCHDOG_NOWAYOUT is*. Only on subsequent closes this
variable has effect.

This is by looking at the 2.6.20 source. Don't know if this was
different before.

regards,
iustin