Linux System - Table 12 > Packages - Table 12 > rt-watchdog

The rt-watchdog program, written by User:Vhmauery is a general userspace watchdog program to prevent the system from being taken over by runaway real-time processes. It launches two threads: the first a SCHED_FIFO 99 thread that runs periodically; the second, a SCHED_OTHER thread that is the canary. When the canary is starved, it stops singing and the watchdog presumes that some (often the number of CPUs) number of processes are hogging all the CPU time. When this happens, it takes some action to remedy the situation. The default action is to kill one or more processes. So it looks at all the real-time threads and processes currently running and determines which ones are taking the most time and kills them systematically.