I was posting about the watchdog device on the raspberry pi a few days ago and how to solve a specific error with the configuration on the pi.

In the meantime I had the watchdog device running for a few days and it worked … kind of …

One should know, that the watchdog devices halts the pi immediately, so it’s not a clean shutoff but more like you would pull the power plug of the pi.

Second, the defaults that are set in the watchdog config are really not great for the raspberry pi. I’ve upped the 15 min max load max-load-15 to 45 and the results weren’t too pleasant. Every time the pi had to compile something or do some heavy lifting, the watchdog device would kill my pi. So far not a problem, until I was about to compile another long running job and the pi died in between.
Upon reboot I got greeted by an emergency boot telling me to run fsck manually. What happened was that the ext4 filesystem badly crashed, beyond the point of repair and my OS setup was gone …

So before setting up the watchdog device on your pi, you should consider checking your max-load values and set them to an appropriate value. Oh and a backup of your data helps too. I had one, from a year ago … when duply stopped working …