Software support for multiple hardware watchdog timers in the Linux OS

In this paper we present a software interface for multiple watchdog timers. Watchdogs are generally used to improve reliability of a computer system. In our proposed approach we use hardware watchdogs to secure not only the whole system, but also the processes self. In embedded systems it is common to check processes by using software watchdogs and to check the system by using one or few hardware watchdogs. Multiple HW watchdogs are not supported by widely used operating systems, and we present a communication interface for the Linux operating system to support multiple watchdog timers per process.