Although this is a subjective matter as there are many SoCs in the market and they use a different type of watchdog timer but the overall concept is the same more or less.There could be many other interfaces as well(depending upon microcontroller or chip vendor) but I have taken a minimalistic example to show boiled down interfacing.CPU receives the reset signal from WDT to identify the timeout condition.Depending upon vendors & types, Watchdog Timer has numbers of CPU programmable memory-mapped registers.Above figure shows a typical arrangement of external WDT to CPU.The processor will restart as if a human operator had cycled the power. And the processor’s reset signal asserted. If WDT reaches to zero, software presumes to malfunction.

The embedded software selects the counter’s initial value and periodically restarts the timer before it reaches zero.Generally speaking, a watchdog timer is kind of timer/counter that counts down from some preset value to zero.

A Watchdog Timer(WDT) is a piece of hardware that uses to automatically detect software anomalies.

5 Issue With Traditional Watchdog Timer.

For information on Rootkit Hunter, visit the Rootkit Hunter developer's Web site at. It updates its security knowledge base through the Internet before each scan.įor the purpose of scanning the server for malware, Watchdog uses the Rootkit Hunter utility. It can notify you by email of scanning results and show reports through the control panel. The Watchdog can scan the server file system for rootkits, backdoors, exploits, trojan horses and other malicious software on demand or on schedule. For information on the monit utility, visit the monit developers' website at. It can run other utilities and notify you when disk space usage has reached the specified amount.įor the purpose of monitoring services and disk space usage, Watchdog uses the monit utility. It can start, stop, and restart the services it monitors, and it can be configured to take actions depending on the stability of a service over some time period.

Web server providing WWW service to users’ sites.

Web server providing the control panel interface.

Watchdog can monitor the following services: The Watchdog component is a solution that ensures that your server is clean from malware, all services are up and running and there is enough free disk space on the server.

What is watchdog