DL325 Gen10: sp5100-tco watchdog

[theserverguy]

Hi all,

to restart a server once it freezes, I use a watchdog. I'm not very happy with the HPE iLO2+ HW Watchdog as it often fails to reboot the server and stays frozen with some cryptic iLO message "The server could not be powered on or a server critical error occurred".

Anyway, I trust the sp5100-tco watchdog way more and on our DL325 Gen10 with kernel 5.15.0 I am able to use it without any problems.

On kernel 5.14.17 the server show "sp5100-tco: Watchdog hardware is disabled" when I load the sp5100-tco kernel module. On kernel 3.10.0 the module loads without this error message but still doesn't provide a watchdog device in /dev. It looks like this watchdog is somehow disabled by the system (BIOS, UEFI, ...) but kernel 5.15.0 doesn't care and still uses it.

I checked the BIOS, I walked through / diffed the entire redfish-tree, but I didn't find any option to enable the sp5100-tco watchdog.

Does anyone have a hint?

Thanks & kind regards

[shuff]

could be due to multiple active watchdog modules being simultaneously active. This can occur on DL325 Gen10 when running certain versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. To resolve this, you can disable the competing watchdog module by creating a file in the directory /etc/modprobe.d with a name ending in .conf, for example, "sp5100_tco.conf", and adding the line: "blacklist sp5100_tco" (I dont know what competing module you might have, so gave you a sp5100 example though I understand you'd want to do the opposite of this example)

[theserverguy]

@shuff Hi, thanks!

I removed the hpwdt module (HPE iLO2+ watchdog) which is the only other watchdog module. No other watchdogs show up in /sys.

Unfortunately, nothing changed.

[TVVJ]

Hello,

Please refer to customer advisories "a00049863en_us" and "a00133872en_us" and see if it helps.

Regards,

[Sunitha_Mod]

Hello @theserverguy,

Let us know if your concern has been addressed.

If you have no further query and you are satisfied with the answer then kindly mark the topic as Solved so that it is helpful for all community members.

[theserverguy]

@TVVJ  @shuff Hi,

unfortunately, the previous answers didn't help and the two advisories are not really related to my question as I primarily asked about sp5100-tco which seems to be disabled on (some?) servers. The advisories might address the hpe-ilo-watchdog issue but my firmware is already up to date.

There seems to be no solution for my issue. But thanks anyway