I wanted to free up memory, and foolishly renamed /usr/sbin/browserd so that it would not respawn when I killall'ed it.

I am aware that MicroB is used for the Conversations applet and probably other things.

This of course had the effect of causing the phone to reboot. And on each reboot, soon after displaying the desktop, the Watchdog would notice browserd's absence and reboot the phone.

I had to reflash and lost the better part of a day getting everything set up again.

A sane configuration of the Watchdog would at least launch an Xterm, as the fix in my case would have taken a mere 5 seconds. Also, I am genuinely interested in Modest, Browser/d and possibly other daemons not running except when I want them to.

I have seen other threads here at TMO re people wishing to tweak Watchdog, but nothing conclusive.

How to fix reboot loop without re-flashing:
./flasher-3.5 --enable-rd-mode --set-rd-flags=no-lifeguard-reset

restart, fix your problem, afterwards disable rd-mode:
./flasher-3.5 --disable-rd-mode

Sorry to read, that you lost your time unnecessarily...

Thanks, geekgirl, I'll remember that for next time.

From what I've read, disabling Watchdog is not suitable for normal usage. So if I wanted to run without browserd and friends, some tweaking/hacking is still required.

It'd be nice to have a way of fixing reboot loops when no computer/data cable is handy, too.

I have multiple devices running without watchdogs. They are closed source and most definitely, are annoying. Disable them and don't look back.

Since your first quandry was wanting to disable browserd, might I suggest you grab browser-switchboard and set it to a different browser to disable the engine preloading.

quick note above does not work with windows, only with a mac or linux

Watchdogs are pieces of hardware that physically reset the device if software stops responding, which usually is due to a hw error or serious os error.

Lifeguard reset is performed by dsme (which is open source) when a software crashes.

I investigated dsme a little before I renamed browserd, but I wasn't able to see any config file with daemons to monitor. I will delve into it a bit further.

Thanks.