Rpi3 is the hardware watchdog enabled by default

Question

I have RaspberryPI's 3 (running both Jessie and Stretch) and tested on both

In order to enable the watchdog timer, In many posts I saw that add in the /boot/config.txt a line with:

dtparam=watchdog=on 

this would enable the watchdog in the device tree.

However, either I add the line or I don't add it, in the dmesg I see

bcm2835-wdt 3f100000.watchdog: Broadcom BCM2835 watchdog timer

The line does not appear in the dmesg only when I add:

dtparam=watchdog=off

So my question is Is the watchdog timer enabled by default?

Relative posts

• https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=147501

Answer 1

Indeed in Pi3 using stretch (and even jessie) the hardware watchdog is enabled by default

Answer 2

In (soon to be unsupported) Jessie there is a known bug in the systemd script - See https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/68332/8697

This is fixed in Stretch.

I don't know how (or why) you got the ancient Wheezy running on a Pi3. My memory for ancient history is poor, but I didn't think Wheezy had support for Device Tree.