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Description of problem:
I've seen once how the watchdog service has failed to start on boot, complaining about missing /dev/watchdog device. After restarting the service manually it started up ok, the device was present.

Currently I'm unable to reproduce this but I wonder could there be a dependency/timing issue with the unit file and device creation? If this doesn't sound plausible/possible, perhaps we can conclude it was a local hickup but would be worth checking.

Thanks.

If you have an IPMI watchdog and use OpenIPMI and have IPMI_WATCHDOG=yes in /etc/sysconfig/ipmi 
then you probably ran into Bug 1133135

If you have another kind of HW watchdog (as per wd_identify )
or like me you do not use OpenIPMI (I'm currently using ipmitool), then you want to ensure the kernel module for your watchdog timer is loaded before you start watchdog.service
I do this by having /etc/modules-load.d/ipmi_watchdog.conf with the line
ipmi_watchdog

moving to 7.8

Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 7 entered the Maintenance Support 1 Phase in August 2019. In this phase only qualified Critical and Important Security errata advisories (RHSAs) and Urgent Priority Bug Fix errata advisories (RHBAs) may be released as they become available. Other errata advisories may be delivered as appropriate.

This bug has been reviewed by Support and Engineering representative and does not meet the inclusion criteria for Maintenance Support 1 Phase. If this issue still exists in newer major version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it has been cloned there and work will continue in the cloned bug.

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lifecycle, please see https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/