embedded software boot camp

Dogging your watchdog

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 by Nigel Jones

Most embedded systems employ watchdog timers. It’s not my intention today to talk about why to use watchdog timers, or indeed how to use them. Rather I assume you know the answers to these questions. Instead, I’ll pass on some tips for how to track down those unexpected watchdog resets that can occur during the development process.

To help find these problems, it is essential to find out where the watchdog reset is occurring. Unfortunately, this isn’t easy, since by definition a watchdog reset will reset the processor, typically destroying all state information that could be used to debug the problem. To get around this problem, here are a few things you can try.

  1. Place a break point on the (watchdog) reset vector. Although this will typically not stop the processor from being reset, it will ensure that none of your variables get initialized by your start up code. As a result, you should be able to use your debugger to examine these variables – which may give you an insight into what is going wrong.
  2. Certain processor architectures allow the action of the watchdog timer to be changed between a classic watchdog (when the timer times out, the processor is reset), to a special form of timer, complete with its own interrupt vector. Although I rarely use this mode of operation in release code, it is very useful for debugging. Simply reconfigure the watchdog to generate an interrupt upon timeout, and place a break point in the watchdog’s ISR. Then when the watchdog times out, your debugger will stop at the break point. It’s then just a simple matter of stepping out of the ISR to return to the exact point in your code where the watchdog timeout occurred.
  3. If neither of the above methods are available to you, and you are genuinely clueless as to where to start looking, then a painful but workable solution is to ‘instrument’ entry into each function. This essentially consists of some code that is placed at the start of every function. The code’s job is to record the ID of the function into some form of storage that will not be affected by a watchdog reset, such that you can identify the offending function after a watchdog reset has occurred. This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds, provided you are good with macros, a scripting language such as Perl and are aware of common compiler vendor extensions such as the macro __FUNCTION__. Of course if you are that good the chances are you won’t be clueless as to why you are taking a watchdog reset!

I’ll leave it to another post to talk about the sort of code that often causes watchdog timeouts.

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