October 2018
Beginner
794 pages
19h 23m
English
A watchdog is essentially a timer-based mechanism that is used to periodically detect if the system is in a healthy state, and if it is deemed not to be, to reboot it.
This is achieved by setting up a (kernel) timer (with, say, a 60-second timeout). If all is well, a watchdog daemon process will consistently disarm the timer before it expires, and subsequently re-enable (arm) it; this is known as petting the dog. If the daemon does not disarm the watchdog timer (due to something having gone badly wrong), the watchdog is annoyed and reboots the system.
A pure software watchdog implementation will not be protected against ...
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