Installing Watchdog Daemon on Arch

Question

I've been following along with the instructions on the Arch Linux Arm wiki.

The install itself went just fine, but in following the post-install suggestions on the Wiki tab, I got stuck at the watchdog section.

The kernel module was easy enough to figure out:

echo 'bcm2835_wdt' >> /etc/modules-load.d/raspberrypi.conf

But I'm not certain how to install the daemon. I know there's an AUR package, do I need to install that one, or am I missing something?

UPDATE:

As per Toby's instructions I figured I'd try the least complicated way. After I had configured Yaourt (which I wanted anyway), I called it to install the AUR package. When it asked me to edit the PKGBUILD, I added armv7h to the arch line. Yaourt and GCC did the rest. Should work on previous Pi's as well.

The Pi apparently only supports a 15 second timeout (default is 60), so to get the minimum config, uncomment the watchdog-device-line and add watchdog-timeout=15 (or less) on a separate line.

Finally, test it for a while before enabling it on startup, some people have complained about reboot loops.

So, thanks Toby, and may other people find this useful. Hopefully someone will finally update the Arch Arm wiki.

Answer 1

Update.

This package was moved from the upstream of the Arch Repo over to the AUR and no one has produced an ARM version so the watchdog package is no longer available via pacman. The sources are available alongside the systemd unit files so you could try compiling it yourself (note the issues tagged on the package page) and enabling the service via the provided units.

Original, defunct answer

Once the Kernel module is enabled you should see the /dev/watchdog device listed (in /dev.) You'll then need to install the watchdog package - this gives you the /etc/watchdog.conf file the Wiki talks about. From there you just configure whatever you want out of it following the man page links for watchdog.conf. It's worth a little reading around for the config as there are quite a lot of options. You may have to enable the watchdog via systemctl enable watchdog to get it running on startup, I don't recall if thats the default or not.

If you aren't seeing the /dev/watchdog device then the kernel module hasn't loaded, you can check if its there via lsmod | grep _wd. If its not you could try and manually load it via modprobe bcm2708_wdog (not a Pi 3) or modprobe bcm2835_wdt (for a Pi 3) but you'd probably want to make it load on boot (via the method you have already mentioned.)