How to force a thread to stop

[H J van Rooyen]

"Damjan" <gdamjan at gmail.com> wrote:


| > | 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.

Yikes! "some poking around" - with two minutes to do it in - must have scarred
you for life!

- Hendrik