Package: watchdog
Version: 5.13-1
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
While testing some watchdog configurations for some embedded hardware, I
noticed that watchdog was not waiting for the configured interval (10
seconds); instead, it was waiting only 5 seconds between checks.
Perusing the source revealed the cause: in watchdog.c, in the main()
function, the program explicitly waits for only half of the requested
interval ("usleep(tint * 500000)"). The implicit assumption is that the
other half of the sleep takes place in test_binary.c, in check_bin().
The problem with that is that the usleep() in check_bin() is only called
when a test_binary is specified. Otherwise, check_bin() returns
immediately.
A further complication is that when a test_directory is used with
several programs in it, check_bin() will be called along with its
usleep() for each one.
So if I have no test_binary or test_directory, I get 50% of the
configured interval. But if I have a test_binary as well as a
test_directory with 8 check binaries in it, I get 500% of the interval
(especially dangerous when the interval is not much smaller than the
watchdog period).
I believe that either this should be fixed, so that the same interval is
used regardless of which test binaries are being in place, or else the
documentation should be corrected to explain the situation (maybe
something like "The interval that will actually be used is determined by
the formula '0.5i * (1 + t)', where i is the interval from the config
file, and t is the number of test programs that will be run per
interval". Yeah, I don't like that very much either.)
Thanks for your attention!
p
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (50, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Versions of packages watchdog depends on:
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.49
ii libc6 2.13-38
ii lsb-base 4.1+Debian8
ii udev 175-7.1
watchdog recommends no packages.
watchdog suggests no packages.
-- debconf information:
watchdog/run: true
watchdog/module: none
watchdog/restart: false
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