the documentation for the watchdog seems to be on the non-existant side ... the toplevel mentions CONFIG_WATCHDOG, but there doesnt seem to be any internal documentation on what exactly this entails for people who want to implement a watchdog (the Blackfin processor has an on-chip watchdog)
looking at include/watchdog.h shows that there is also the (undocumented) CONFIG_HW_WATCHDOG option which implies CONFIG_WATCHDOG is only for software watchdogs (which the toplevel README doesnt mention)
sadly, the watchdog.h seems to have PPC-specific warts here (using the "bl" instruction in assembly), inconsistent defines for the reset function (trailing "()"), and the common API only covers a reset function ... there is no init function
usage wise, there seems to be a requirement that there be a periodic timer to reset the watchdog as well as the random sprinkling of calls to "WATCHDOG_RESET ()" through some core pieces of code. there also doesnt seem to be information on what the standard expected timeout for the watchdog is ... 1 second ? 5 seconds ? a minute ?
and is it just me, or is doing something like: void hw_watchdog_reset(void) { } seem kind of stupid ? -mike