Task Watchdog
Overview
Many microcontrollers feature a hardware watchdog timer peripheral. Its purpose is to trigger an action (usually a system reset) in case of severe software malfunctions. Once initialized, the watchdog timer has to be restarted (“fed”) in regular intervals to prevent it from timing out. If the software got stuck and does not manage to feed the watchdog anymore, the corrective action is triggered to bring the system back to normal operation.
In real-time operating systems with multiple tasks running in parallel, a single watchdog instance may not be sufficient anymore, as it can be used for only one task. This software watchdog based on kernel timers provides a method to supervise multiple threads or tasks (called watchdog channels).
An existing hardware watchdog can be used as an optional fallback if the task watchdog itself or the scheduler has a malfunction.
The task watchdog uses a kernel timer as its backend. If configured properly, the timer ISR is never actually called during normal operation, as the timer is continuously updated in the feed calls.
It’s currently not possible to have multiple instances of task watchdogs. Instead, the task watchdog API can be accessed globally to add or delete new channels without passing around a context or device pointer in the firmware.
The maximum number of channels is predefined via Kconfig and should be adjusted to match exactly the number of channels required by the application.
Configuration Options
Related configuration options can be found under subsys/task_wdt/Kconfig.