Can I send a heart beat to hardware watch dog from my own program?

Question

Following on from the question and excellent answer provided by Steve Robillard here:

How do I hard reset a Raspberry Pi

How can I send a heartbeat signal from my own program to the BCM2708's hardware watchdog instead of from the Linux watchdog daemon? In other words, I want to reset the RPi if MY program is not running (which executes on startup), not only when the whole system is frozen.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can and it's quite easy. RPi has a Linux module that implements standard Linux watchdog API. You can find documentation of this here. Now, if you read this, you will know that there is a special device file called /dev/watchdog and in order to use watchdog you have to open this file and write some data (one byte, it's best to write something other than 'V' which I'm explaining later) to it from time to time. If you won't write anything to this file for long enough, watchdog will trigger reboot. You can find example program (very simple) here. Note that in normal situation, if you close /dev/watchdog, watchdog can be disabled. There is a special mode called 'Magic Close feature' which seems to be implemented by RPi driver but AFAIK it's not enabled in default kernel configuration (CONFIG_WATCHDOG_NOWAYOUT option). In this case, reboot will be triggered even if you close /dev/watchdog unless you write 'V' to it just before quiting the app. You should test yourself if it is indeed disabled (I don't have RPi here right now to test) but if it isn't, it's not good for you. If your application crashes, watchdog device file will be closed and reboot won't be triggered and this is why you want it. In this situation you can either change kernel configuration and rebuild it or write specialized application that is going to monitor if your main application is working (using some IPC method for example).

There is also ioctl API which allows you to do some more with watchdog. You can for example set different timeout - IOCTL with WDIOC_SETTIMEOUT (seems to be supported by RPI driver) or get timeout - IOCTL with WDIOC_GETTIMEOUT (also seems to be supported). You may want to use it to modify default timeout (10 seconds). There is hard limit to 16 seconds however. Here's example:

int timeout = 15;
int fd = open("/dev/watchdog", O_WRONLY);
ioctl(fd, WDIOC_SETTIMEOUT, &timeout);

You can also use IOCTL with WDIOC_KEEPALIVE instead of writing a character if you want. Both methods are valid.