From userspace, how can I tell if Linux's soft watchdog is configured with no way out?

Question

I am writing a system monitor for Linux and want to include some watchdog functionality. In the kernel, you can configure the watchdog to keep going even if /dev/watchdog is clo

Answer 1

a watchdog guards against hard-locking the system, either because of a software crash, or hardware failure.

what you need is a daemon monitoring daemon (dmd). check 'monit'