hardware watchdog on raspberry pi 3

lecine · March 31, 2017 at 10:51 AM

Hi,
My pi3 freezes from time to time when synchronizing big amount of data over the network (via sftp or samba).
It could be one of my network switches which sends strange packets.
By the way, I'd like to enable the hardware watchdog on my pi3 to reboot it.
modprobe bcm2835_wdt works (but lsmod doesn't show the module as loaded after that)
but I can't install any "watchdog" package, so
systemctl enable watchdog.service fails

Any hint on this ?
Thanks

**Klojum** · March 31, 2017 at 11:04 AM Official Post

The Watchdog service has been the source for many problems in the past.

Are you using wifi or wired network connections?

d8a7ed · May 30, 2017 at 3:44 AM

this would be very helpful for me as well, i have a rpi2 hooked up to a projector in an attic, and i have to cut the breaker everytime i need to reboot it (once a month?), if it could just kill itself and fire back up, boy would that be great

**Iridium** · December 2, 2017 at 6:23 PM Official Post

Is the watchdog service enabled? I've tried it on raspbian and it worked fine.

I can see on my RPi3

Libreelec:~ # ps -ef|grep watchdog

11 root 0:03 [watchdog/0]

14 root 0:02 [watchdog/1]

20 root 0:02 [watchdog/2]

26 root 0:02 [watchdog/3]

39 root 0:00 [watchdogd]

31253 root 0:00 grep watchdog

So something is running, and they have a priority of RT.They can also not be killed with kill -9 39

However, trying the normal fork bomb :(){ :|:& };: fails with -sh: syntax error: bad function name.

Whereas

Code

bomb() {  bomb | bomb &
}; bomb

Works, but the system just stalls and nothing happens - even though ping still works.

I tried adding

Code

dtparam=watchdog=on

To config.txt but without any success.

So it seems that something is almost there but not actually working.

As @Klojum mentioned it caused problems but with the addition of the dtparm option users could enable/disable the watchdog if they feel the need