On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 7:27 PM, Thomas Bächler
The watchdog package contains two daemons: wd_keepalive and watchdog.
They both connect to /dev/watchdog and send keepalives to the kernel watchdog driver, which in turn sends them to the watchdog chip. Once it stops doing so, the watchdog chip will shut down or reboot the machine. The kernel also has a software watchdog driver, but that will not detect if the kernel itself locks up completely.
Also, the watchdog daemon can monitor network, system load and other things and will reboot the machine under certain conditions.
The package is in AUR, but doesn't have too many votes. However, Dan was planning to use this in gerolde (which we really should do) and thus it should be an extra package. Opinions?
No objections here. If we are to use it on gerolde (doing it would be a good idea) then it makes sense to have it in extra.