WDT_DISABLE_AT_BOOT, if enabled by default, degrades functionality of the watchdog #22858
Labels
area: Watchdog
Watchdog
bug
The issue is a bug, or the PR is fixing a bug
priority: medium
Medium impact/importance bug
Milestone
#21142 made WDT_DISABLE_AT_BOOT option default to y.
Motivation behind the PR was to enforce the consistent default behavior of the watchdog to be "disabled by default until explicitly enabled by the application." However, this approach is wrong. There is a very good reason why some vendors start the watchdog automatically upon reset: the code can hang during the boot process before the software has a chance to configure it.
There are several other major issues with having WDT_DISABLE_AT_BOOT enabled by default.
Having WDT_DISABLE_AT_BOOT set to y makes it easy for us to maintain samples and testcases since we almost never want the watchdog to be enabled (apart from the watchdog testcase). However, in production environment the opposite is true.
To fix the issue reported in #21025 we can set the option to y in a board Kconfig.defconfig file. It's more work for us since we need to modify every evaluation board that is starting the watchdog automatically but it saves extra work and frustration for Zephyr users.
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