Watchdog Error Message?

[cottfcfan]

When Waking from Suspend, I have 3 error messages appear about Watchdog.
When I ran dmesg I found this:

[18507.824679] watchdog: only one watchdog can use /dev/watchdog.
[18507.824684] watchdog: error registering /dev/watchdog (err=-16).
[18507.824687] mei: unable to register watchdog device.

Does anyone know what this is?
Is it important?
Will it affect my system?
This has only started happening in 12.04.

[jim_24601]

Yes. It seems to be benign, but it's annoying.

A little digging turns up this thread on Arch which goes into a fair bit of detail about the problem. According to the discussion there, the problem is that you've got two watchdog drivers loaded but the kernel supports only one at a time. Blacklisting the "mei" module should make the messages go away. I will try it and report back.

[cottfcfan]

Thanks for looking at this Jim.
I will wait to hear from you.

[jim_24601]

OK. Seems to work. I created the file '/etc/modprobe.d/mei.conf' containing the line

blacklist mei

This silenced the annoying barking from the watchdog.
It seems a bit of a cop-out, but my efforts to dig deeper into the problem left me none the wiser, and since both watchdog and MEI are firmly in the "why do I even have one of those?" category right now as far as I'm concerned, I'm not planning on spending any more time on it.

[cottfcfan]

OK. Seems to work. I created the file '/etc/modprobe.d/mei.conf' containing the line

blacklist mei

This silenced the annoying barking from the watchdog.
It seems a bit of a cop-out, but my efforts to dig deeper into the problem left me none the wiser, and since both watchdog and MEI are firmly in the "why do I even have one of those?" category right now as far as I'm concerned, I'm not planning on spending any more time on it.

Thanks that seems to work.
Actually you can add "blacklist mei" straight to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, without creating a new folder.
Thanks for all your help, i'll mark the thread as solved.

[Jaredtinari]

Hey there,
I'm pretty new to Ubuntu and linux altogether. Ive been having the same watchdog error message upon resume and although its benign, I like everything to be as perfect as possible. Can you just instruct me on what exactly i type into terminal? Where do I add the "blacklist mei"? All help is greatly appreciated!

thanks!

[cottfcfan]

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

add the line:
"blacklist mei" without the quotes to the bottom of the file.
Save & reboot.

[nousplacidus]

For those of you who are wondering what the consequences of blacklisting the MEI driver will be, there's a short explanation of the purpose of the MEI computing resource here:

http://lwn.net/Articles/440292/

In short, it's there to support IT management. If IT isn't managing your box, you can blacklist is safely it seems.

[Polydorus]

I'm getting the following message, using dmeg, after startup:

mei: module is from staging directory, the quality is unknown, you have been warned.

The only harm seems to be a bit slower startup. Is there anything I should do about it?

TIA

[invictuschamp]

does this breach any security?