@papampi:
I found a solution for starting watchdog from rc.local. Just call it like this:
(sleep 90 && systemctl restart watchdog.service)&
this will sleep a little before restarting watchdog, but it will do so in the background and allow for rc.local to terminate beforehand.
Now, on a intel mobo I'm loading the iTCO_wdt module and the dmesg output looks good:
[ 120.924534] iTCO_vendor_support: vendor-support=0
[ 120.927694] iTCO_wdt: Intel TCO WatchDog Timer Driver v1.11
[ 120.927729] iTCO_wdt: Found a Lynx Point TCO device (Version=2, TCOBASE=0x1860)
[ 120.927827] iTCO_wdt: initialized. heartbeat=30 sec (nowayout=0)
bytiges.