I have a question about the nature of the watchdog reset on the AGX board. I am running Linux 2.4.19 and I configure and enable the Xscale's watchdog via the Linux device driver. This appears to work as expected since the Xscale resets when the watchdog is allowed to timeout. However the AGX does not seem to reset cleanly because I see the following message toward the end of bootup:
NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
which is repeated every few seconds. This message does not appear during bootup after hitting the reset button.
My question is: should a watchdog reset produce a clean reset of the board? What should I do to achieve this?
We are not able to reproduce this using the latest software and CPLD version. What version of the kernel and CPLD do you have? (uname -a; dmesg | grep CPLD)
That's a pretty old Kernel. We can reproduce the problem with that kernel version. Can you upgrade to the current 2.4.27 kernel?
You may also need to get a newer CPLD. But I can't tell because I don't see the CPLD version in your message. 'dmesg | grep CPLD' should find the CPLD version that's displayed by the kernel when it initializes.
Can I consider upgrading the CPLD version only, or is the kernel upgrade (which I would prefer to avoid) necessary with respect to the watchdog problem?
I should have asked earlier about your bootloader. Is your bootloader older than 4.10? If so, you should upgrade your bootloader to the latest. Prior to 4.10 and the CPLD change the ethernet was not being reset upon reboots (or watchdog timer resets).
I would recommend that you try 2.6. But you should be aware that 2.6 has been used much less than 2.4 so you may discover situations where there are problems.