Unblacklisting the ARM SBSA Watchdog driver

[Paolo Pisati]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 4:04 PM Antoine Lassagne <
antoine.lassagne at canonical.com> wrote:

> Hello kernel team,
>
> I'm asking here about the possibility of removing the blacklist that is
> put on the sbsa_gwdt module.
> This module handles the ARM SBSA Generic watchdog [1]. The module kicks
> the watchdog when it's there and, without it, some machines will get
> unattended reboot after a few minutes of uptime.
>
> All the watchdog modules were blacklisted a long time ago, after there
> were problems with an HP watchdog if I understand it correctly. This
> comment from Andy Whitcroft [2] is the closest related message I could find
> about "why" this blacklist exists.
>
> Now, some devices actually need this. Lately, Nvidia released ARM devices
> that are based on an Ubuntu-based distro [3]. But if someone wants to
> install stock Ubuntu on these, the hardware will reboot after 10min.
>
> After I asked around, I came up with a hacky package that bypasses the
> blacklist only on some identified hardware [4]. The problem is that it
> requires us to identify the hardware first, and then it's hard-coded and
> will not support new hardware without an update. Unblacklisting the
> watchdog would be very, very much better, so much more hardware would be
> supported.
>
> Is there a path towards unblacklisting this specific watchdog on
> resolute/devel, and get some user feedback?
>

Hi Antoine,
your request makes sense: i pushed a patch on top of linux-unstable [1]
that removes sbsa_gwdt from the watchdog blacklist - it will appear in
resolute/linux once it moves to v6.19.

1:
https://git.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-kernel/ubuntu/+source/linux/+git/unstable
-- 
bye,
p.
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