hardware watchdog on raspberry pi 3

1st Official Post

    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

    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

    • 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