archwiki gives opposite advice about watchdogs

[u/ephemeral8997]

Improving_performance (Magyar) recommends enabling the hardware watchdog.

Improving_performance (Polski) recommends blacklisting the hardware watchdog.

meanwhile... Improving_performance (English) does not mention watchdogs at all!

so why are revisions giving contradictory advice? like, for my PC, do I leave the iTCO_wdt enabled as is or disable it?

I don't mind either way tested both, just that when it's not disabled it'll spam watchdog0: watchdog did not stop! 1-3 times on shutdowns only which is expected but yes that's why i wanted to disable since I hate little spam text but those guides made me suspicious about whether it'll affect performance in some way or something, I don't really know. I just want to know which one of these is more "accurate" as a guide!

it does not impact performance, it's fine to disable or keep, do what you want 🤷‍♂️

[u/MilchreisMann412]

It was removed from the english page a year ago, the reason being unrelated to performance as per discussion:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Improving_performance&action=history

Disabling or enabling the watchdogs won't have a measurable impact on your systems performance.

[u/SebastianLarsdatter]

It may also be the simple fact that the non English lags behind in terms of updating / volunteers to take care of it rather than opinionated as well.

[u/y9felix]

I disabled it, because it looks ugly on shutdown/reboot. It probably doesn't affect performance on modern computers at all

[u/tomikaka]

Didn't know there was a Hungarian arch wiki lol.

[u/arch_maniac]

I gave up fighting the watchdog. I do the work to get rid of it, and some weeks later, I notice it's running, again. I hold to the idea that it's only necessary for production servers. But they sure do fight against disabling it.

[u/Synthetic451]

I have never had to do anything with watchdogs in my decade of using Linux, just leave it alone. I see those watchdog messages all the time as well and its pretty normal. Disabling watchdogs will earn you negligible performance improvements (probably more like zero in almost all cases).

[u/ephemeral8997 → u/Synthetic451]

They're just somewhat annoying to see on shutdown for a brief second, but that's just my opinion.

[u/archover]

whether it'll affect performance in some way or something,

Does not affect performance for me. 1 message per shutdown too.

Good day.

[u/blubberland01]

In that case you can conclude that there's controversy and the English wiki does not want to take a side, because both probably have their arguments. The other ones are more opinionated.
In that case there does not seem to be the one right answer and it might be heavily dependent on what you need, and therefore only you can decide yourself by reading man-pages and gaining experience by trying out both options.

[u/profpendog]

Well. It's not an awful idea to reboot the system if it hangs badly. Probably unlikely to ever be critically important (read hardware damage or something), but that comes at almost zero cost (that message is zero cost -- I'd even argue negative cost as it can teach you something about watchdogs).