How to force a thread to stop

[Damjan]

> | A common recovery mechanism in embedded systems is a watchdog timer,
> | which is a hardware device that must be poked by the software every
> | so often (e.g. by writing to some register).  If too long an interval
> | goes by without a poke, the WDT hard-resets the cpu.  Normally the
> | software would poke the WDT from its normal periodic timing routine.
> | A loop like you describe would stop the timing routine from running,
> | eventually resulting in a reset.
> 
> *grin* - Yes of course - if the WDT was enabled - its something that I
> have not seen on PC's yet...

The intel 810 chipset (and all after that) has a builtin watchdog timer -
unfortunetally on some motherboards it's disabled (I guess in the BIOS).

How do I know that?
Once I got Linux installed on a new machine.... and although the install
went without a problem, after the first boot the machine would reboot on
exactly 2 minutes. 
After a bit of poking around I found that hotplug detected the WDT support
and loaded the driver for it (i8xx_tco), and it seems the WDT chip was set
to start ticking right away after the driver poked it. 



-- 
damjan