Thread: watchdog
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Old 14th April 2011
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Right. In the event of a managed kernel panic, the kernel will attempt to dump RAM contents into swap space, and then reboot the system. This will work, if the kernel is still functioning.

The advantage of using a hardware watchdog timer -- if the hardware has one -- is that it acts as a dead man's switch so that hardware gets rebooted automatically if the kernel isn't communicating with the hardware regularly.
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