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I have been allerted regarding watchdog a lot during my Linux days. Mostly I get that watchdog did not stop during shutdown ...or it did not start during boot.

It has no particular effect and the shutdowns and boots went just fine regardless of that annoying message,

So what does that annoying watchdog do and can I please kill it ?

Well the watchdog does keep watch om mission critical computers:

A watchdog timer [...] is an electronic timer that is used to detect and recover from computer malfunctions. During normal operation, the computer regularly resets the watchdog timer [...]. If, [...], the computer fails to reset the watchdog, the timer will elapse and generate a timeout signal [...] used to initiate corrective [...] actions [...] typically include placing the computer system in a safe state and restoring normal system operation.
Many users need this feature due to their system's mission-critical role (i.e. servers), or because of the lack of power reset (i.e. embedded devices). Thus, this feature is required for a good operation in some situations. On the other hand, normal users (i.e. desktop and laptop) do not need this feature and can disable it.

..and I don't need it on my laptop!

Time to kill this dog then:
First I checked if the watchdog was indeed active on my system with:

If it returns "1" then it is active (...this will be the case on most systems).

I then edited /etc/default/grub like this and added nowatchdog to the GRUB cmdline:

simply by adding a space and nowatchdog to the end of the line.

Then I made it persistent by re-generating grub.cfg file like this:


Rebooted and the watchdog was gone!


If you want to check this first before making it permanent you can simply hit e during boot and add nowatchdog to the end of your linux line.
This will disable it for one boot but not be permanent.

That is it you have killed your watchdog! ..And your system will boot faster because there is one less module to be loaded.