Are boot time journalctl entries for "sp5100-tco: Watchdog hardware is disabled" something to fix or informational?

Looking back through my reboots in journalctl, it looks like I’ve been getting this notification rather consistently near/at the top of my logs…

$ journalctl -k --priority err
-- Journal begins at Tue 2021-07-13 15:47:15 CDT, ends at Fri 2021-12-10 15:42:16 CST. --
Dec 10 15:01:33 AM4-5600X-Linux kernel: sp5100-tco sp5100-tco: Watchdog hardware is disabled

Doing a quick DDG, I see some people talking about putting it on some kernel ignore list… but that sounds hacky, and doesn’t really tell me about the root of the issue in the first place. Searching in these forums I see it popping up in many peoples logs about other issues… so it seems to be common/benign; not a topic discussed in an of itself.

I’d like to know what this message is trying to tell me and whether it deserves my attention… or if it’s an informational message that’s safe to ignore. I’ve run into scenarios before where I’ve been advised that some log entries are more meant for “the developers” (debugging?) and not really important for me.

Note: This message is logged at the “Error” Priority… excluded if I scope journalctl to crit, alert, and emerg.

Hello @Daniel-I :wink:

To put it simple:

  1. Watchdog is a device which keeps sure that the system will shutdown/reboot and don’t stay/hang at some point. This useful on servers or headless systems, where you don’t have access to the power button.
  2. sp5100-tco is the module for your system, which is needed for watchdog.

So, if you disabled watchdog, then also also blacklist this module or just ignore it.

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Thank you for chiming in on this question @megavolt !

I don’t recall disabling anything… is Watchdog a motherboard/BIOS thing, or an extra peripheral folks add to headless systems? If a BIOS thing, not enabling it might have been the BIOS default in my case… and I’d be okay with that given your description about what it is.

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Yes, exactly that.

Awesome! Added to the ignore list :wink: :+1:

EDIT: Oh this tricksie hobbit’s module name (per mkinitcpio -M) is sp5100_tco (underscore, not dash)… hmm, I’m starting to like the sound of the blacklist :innocent:

EDIT #2: Anyone who found this thread and wants to know what steps I made to blacklist sp5100_tco… see Are boot time journalctl entries for "ucsi_ccg 0-0008: failed to get FW build information" something to fix or informational? - #3 by Daniel-I and simply update the names/descriptions to match.

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