This ticket to study the enablement of the i6300esb intel PCI device or ARM. allow its compilation in qemu, test the behavior with guest. Most probably the fact we enable an intel device on ARM may be frown upon. Maybe the community will push for another solution (other emulated model?, rebranding of the PCI device?).

What were you trying to do that didn't work?

On an arm64 Virtual Machine, adding the i6300esb watchdog device prevents the VM from starting with the following error:
error: Failed to start domain 'VM_name'
error: internal error: QEMU unexpectedly closed the monitor (vm='VM_name'): 2025-04-07T19:24:06.810485Z qemu-kvm: -device {"driver":"i6300esb","id":"watchdog0","bus":"pci.16","addr":"0x1"}: 'i6300esb' is not a valid device model name

What is the impact of this issue to you?

CU is unable to add watchdog device 

How reproducible is this bug?:

100%

Steps to reproduce

1. Build a VM on an ARM KVM host
2. Attempt to add the i6300esb watchdog device to the VM
3. Attempt to start the VM

Expected results

VM should start

Actual results

VM fails to start with listed error.

Reviewing this online, it appears that likely the driver for this watchdog device is missing and needs to be added.