Jetson TK1 watchdog

Hello all,

I’m quite new to both the jetson and this forum. I have been able to get most things up and running however I have been trying and failing to get the watchdog working on the Jetson TK1 and am running ubuntu 3.10.24-grinch-19.3.8
I have run apt-get install watchdog and have started the service however I cannot seem to force the service to reboot.
Any help would be appreciated. Many thanks

There is a configuration file which may need adjustment. I have not done this on Jetson, but here is the Ubuntu man page covering 14.04:
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man5/watchdog.conf.5.html

I don’t know about Grinch kernels, but the default kernel of R21.4 comes pre-configured with watchdog support. The evidence is the existence of “/dev/watchdog0”. Does this exist on your Jetson?

The way the watchdog works is that any time /dev/watchdog0 is open for reading, a timer runs, and if the file is not written to within a certain time (perhaps 60 seconds), then the system reboots. I verified that this works by running this command to keep the file open:

tail -f /dev/watchdog0

…the Jetson rebooted itself after about 60 seconds when tail kept the file open without writing to the file. Presumably one could do something to emulate the watchdog service by “sudo echo 1 > /dev/watchdog0” every 10 seconds or so, thus writing to the file and resetting the timer.

Should the system not reboot, you know one of these conditions occurred:

  • /dev/watchdog0 was not kept open for reading...open must be continuous, writing won't matter when not open (the timer countdown stops if the file is not open for read);
  • /dev/watchdog0 was open for reading, but something wrote to this file before the configured watchdog timer ran out;
  • /dev/watchdog0 was not configured in the kernel and thus does not exist.