Guenter Roeck wrote:
The current watchdog API suggests that the pretimeout "allows Linux to record useful information (like panic information and kernel coredumps) before it resets". The call to panic() would be the means to make this happen.
Now that I think about it, that does make sense.
However, if a pre-timeout is not set, then the driver should never call panic(). That means that the interrupt handler should only be registered if sbsa_gwdt_set_pretimeout() is called.