Número del artículo: 000146106
With the inclusion of support for watchdog hardware, systemd can now perform the function of a watchdog daemon Linux. On Dell PowerEdge systems, this hardware could either be the chipset watchdog timer built into the platform’s chipset (like Intel ICH9) or Dell iDRAC’s IPMI-compliant BMC watchdog timer.
Dell iDRAC provides Automated System Recovery which, in addition to recovering from operating system lock-ups, can capture a screenshot for analysis later. It was necessary to additional software on the operating system to enable this. With newer distributions supporting systemd, this feature works with software available natively in a distribution, eliminating the need for add-on software.
It was however possible to use the watchdogd daemon on Linux, but there was a probability where the daemon itself could lock-up while the rest of the system was operational. systemd acts as the software watchdog for all system services and the BMC watchdog timer acts as the hardware watchdog for systemd itself. So if systemd is nonoperational, there is a good chance that the system is unusable in general. So we now have a more reliable method for all system services, the manager of the services (systemd) to be 'watched' by the BMC’s watchdog timer.
The glue between systemd and Dell iDRAC’s BMC watchdog is the ipmi_watchdog kernel module, which provides Linux watchdog API access to the BMC watchdog using /dev/watchdog. Systemd uses this interface to kick the watchdog periodically.
Systemd can be configured to use iDRAC BMC watchdog with these steps (on Fedora 19):
19 set. 2023
6
How To