This adds the option to use a hrtimer to generate a watchdog pretimeout
event for hardware watchdogs that do not natively support watchdog
pretimeouts.
With this enabled, all watchdogs will appear to have pretimeout support
in userspace. If no pretimeout value is set, there will be no change in
the watchdog's behavior. If a pretimeout value is set for a specific
watchdog that does not have built-in pretimeout support, a timer will be
started that should fire at the specified time before the watchdog
timeout would occur. When the watchdog is successfully pinged, the timer
will be restarted. If the timer is allowed to fire it will generate a
pretimeout event. However because a software timer is used, it may not
be able to fire in every circumstance.
If the watchdog does support a pretimeout natively, that functionality
will be used instead of the hrtimer.
The general design of this feaure was inspired by the software watchdog,
specifically its own pretimeout implementation. However the software
watchdog and this feature are completely independent. They can be used
together; with or without CONFIG_SOFT_WATCHDOG_PRETIMEOUT enabled.
The main advantage of using the hrtimer pretimeout with a hardware
watchdog, compared to running the software watchdog with a hardware
watchdog, is that if the hardware watchdog driver is unable to ping the
watchdog (e.g. due to a bus or communication error), then the hrtimer
pretimeout would still fire whereas the software watchdog would not.
Signed-off-by: Curtis Klein <curtis.klein@hpe.com>
Reviewed-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/1612383090-27110-1-git-send-email-curtis.klein@hpe.com
Signed-off-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
Signed-off-by: Wim Van Sebroeck <wim@linux-watchdog.org>
Curtis Klein