Raspberry Pi watchdog made simple

Updated 2025-10-15 for Trixie !

The purpose of a watchdog timer(WD) is very well described here but a more practical answer is;

If your Raspberry Pi(RPi) "freezes", or hangs, it will automagically reboot within a very short time.

This is made with a combination of hardware and software which is all ready available, on the RPi, and just have to be enabled.

After some hours Googling and testing these are my findings !

Intro

There are different ways activating a WD function, including installing packages, but this "native" way seems to be the most simple.

Trixie

It's very interesting that the WD is activated by default with the parameter "RuntimeWatchdogUSec=1min". If you want to change any of the parameters check below.

Before Trixie

You can check the devices involved with

$ ls -al /dev/watchdog*
crw------- 1 root root 10, 130 Oct 1 14:17 /dev/watchdog
crw------- 1 root root 250, 0 Oct 1 14:17 /dev/watchdog0

and the hardware involved are the processors on the RPI.

The WD is a systemd process so you can use the "systemctl" command to show the default setup.

$ systemctl show | grep -i watchdog

WatchdogLastPingTimestampMonotonic=18446744073709551615

RuntimeWatchdogUSec=0

RuntimeWatchdogPreUSec=0

RebootWatchdogUSec=10min

KExecWatchdogUSec=0

ServiceWatchdogs=yes

The info "RuntimeWatchdogUSec=0" tells us that the WD isn't active. Must be greater than 0.

Enable the Watchdog

The WD is enabled by editing

$ sudo nano /etc/systemd/system.conf

where the different parameters are described here and in my case I choose

RuntimeWatchdogSec=10
RebootWatchdogSec=2min

which means that if the WD hardware will not be contacted within 10 seconds the reboot process will start and the second parameter ensures that the reboot takes place even if a clean reboot attempt times out.

Please note that the value "RuntimeWatchdogSec" must be <= 15, since the RPi processors can't handle a greater value.

Start the Watchdog

After a reboot you can check the new values with the above command and also confirm that the WD process have started. Use

$ dmesg | grep watchdog
[ 3.125165] bcm2835-wdt bcm2835-wdt: Broadcom BCM2835 watchdog timer
[ 5.200029] systemd[1]: Hardware watchdog 'Broadcom BCM2835 Watchdog timer', version 0

or using the above command again

$ systemctl show | grep -i watchdog

WatchdogDevice=/dev/watchdog0

WatchdogLastPingTimestamp=Wed 2023-11-08 23:09:24 CET

WatchdogLastPingTimestampMonotonic=336868708

RuntimeWatchdogUSec=10s

RuntimeWatchdogPreUSec=0

RebootWatchdogUSec=2min

KExecWatchdogUSec=0

ServiceWatchdogs=yes

or on Bookworm  

$ journalctl -b --no-pager | grep Watchdog

Nov 09 10:14:41 test systemd[1]: Using hardware watchdog 'Broadcom BCM2835 Watchdog timer', version 0, device /dev/watchdog0

Nov 09 10:14:41 test systemd[1]: Watchdog running with a timeout of 10s.

Nov 09 10:15:05 test rtkit-daemon[802]: Watchdog thread running.

Testing ?

If you dare 😉 you can test the WD function, creating a kernel panic, with the commands

$ sudo su
/home/pi# echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
/home/pi# echo "c" > /proc/sysrq-trigger
client_loop: send disconnect: Broken pipe

It's said that a fork bomb also can test the WD but it seems that process limit parameters are set, in later RPi OS, so it limits the amount of forks. Some processes are terminated and restarted but no reboot.

Remark

As mentioned above there also is a watchdog package with extended features available, edited in watchdog.conf, such as;

• Temperature Sensors
• Load Averages
• Network Monitoring
• Network "ping"
• File Monitoring
• Memory Test

where set thresholds for these will restart the RPi.

Install with 

$ sudo apt install watchdog

and check out a very nice site explaining it all.

A second thought

I was first very interested in this watchdog package, handling a RPi Zero WiFi going down, but thought that a reboot was a little "to much" if just the WiFi is disconnected. 

This post handles how to check the WiFi and, if not connected, turn the interface down/up.

Jessie info 

Default setup

$ systemctl show | grep -i watchdog
RuntimeWatchdogUSec=0
ShutdownWatchdogUSec=10min
ServiceWatchdogs=yes

Parameters in /etc/systemd/system.conf

RuntimeWatchdogSec=10
ShutdownWatchdogSec=2min