OPNsense Forum

I am running OPNsense on an ODroid-H4 and it works great. The H4 BIOS supports the The Intel TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Watchdog Timer.

What is the Intel TCO Watchdog Timer
This is a hardware watchdog in the chipset and BIOS of the computer whose purpose is to reboot the computer if the system hangs. If the hardware watchdog does not receive a ping at a regular interval it will cause a hardware reset. To work, the software must run a software Watchdog daemon which regularly writes to the ACPI hardware tables. In this way, if the OS hangs then there is no update to the tables, the hardware watchdog sees this and reboots the computer.

I see there is support in FreeBSD for the Intel TCO Watchdog Timer, the "ichwd" driver.

The Intel TCO Watchdog Timer is not just ODROID-H4 specific, but many Intel based systems support this.


Feature Request
Add a package that enables support for the Intel TCO Watchdog Timer.

I image it would have a few simple settings that could be set:

• watchdog-timeout = 14
• realtime = yes

Plus the ability to:

• View watchdog logs

Reference
ODroid-H4 Intel TCO Watchdog on Linux/Ubuntu (https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h4/application_note/tco_watchdog_timer)
FreeBSD - ichwd --   device driver for the Intel ICH   watchdog interrupt timer (https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ichwd)