watchdog question

[Konrad Neuwirth]

Dear readers, 

because of a problem of a system freezing up ever so often (and so hard that even the kernel debugger wont launch), I am looking into activating the hardware watchdog. I've configured it in the kernel and it is recognized all well. 

Now, my question: I read the kernel.watchdog.auto and kernel.watchdog.period knobs to mean the kernel can auto-update the kernel; on the other hand, the documentation refers me to the watchdogd daemon. The latter one claims /dev/wdog isn't writable. But why have two solutions to one problem? Doesn't the kernel auto updating suffice, anyway? 

Thank you, 
 Konrad