On 24.12.2003, at 10:31, Justin Albstmeijer wrote:

> Killing the watchdogd, does not solve the reboot problem.

Uhoh, Justin, unless there's another problem I haven't seen yet, you 
owe me one now. ;) Killing watchdogd does indeed solve the problem - of 
course I did not try this at first after you said it didn't help. Are 
you really sure you actually killed the watchdogd process? It makes 
perfect sense to me now: at 100.0% CPU load (mostly interrupts), that 
poor watchdogd process starves and doesn't get to tickle the watchdog 
again. After about 30 seconds, the watchdog timer fires, the CPU is 
reset - bingo. Also, now I know why I didn't see this problem back when 
I was doing some serious throughput testing with net45xx's and 
m0n0wall: there was no watchdogd in m0n0wall at that time!

Since running watchdogd at an increased (or even realtime) priority 
doesn't help here (I tried it, too), I'm wondering what net45xx 
m0n0wall users think we should do... I see two solutions:

- removing watchdogd

- using polling by default on net45xx

I'm not sure if the latter is such a good idea (even though polling 
yields a slightly higher throughput), because wireless cards can still 
cause the same problem.

If no better solution is proposed, I'll just remove watchdogd from the 
next release. I'm not entirely sure it's needed anyway... has anybody's 
net45xx ever hung up for no reason? Mine certainly haven't.

- Manuel