Bug 1393321

Summary:	watchdog service failed to start due to missing /dev/watchdog
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7	Reporter:	Marko Myllynen <myllynen>
Component:	watchdog	Assignee:	Vaclav Dolezal <vdolezal>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	BaseOS QE - Apps <qe-baseos-apps>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	7.3	CC:	jscotka, pcfe
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2020-01-30 12:45:48 UTC	Type:	Bug
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:

Description Marko Myllynen 2016-11-09 10:28:32 UTC

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.

Comment 2 Patrick C. F. Ernzer 2018-08-23 12:39:14 UTC

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

Comment 3 Josef Ridky 2019-01-10 11:01:50 UTC

moving to 7.8

Comment 4 Vaclav Dolezal 2020-01-30 12:45:48 UTC

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/