Description¶

sd_watchdog_enabled() may be called by a service to detect whether the service manager expects regular keep-alive watchdog notification events from it, and the timeout after which the manager will act on the service if it did not get such a notification.

If the $WATCHDOG_USEC environment variable is set, and the $WATCHDOG_PID variable is unset or set to the PID of the current process, the service manager expects notifications from this process. The manager will usually terminate a service when it does not get a notification message within the specified time after startup and after each previous message. It is recommended that a daemon sends a keep-alive notification message to the service manager every half of the time returned here. Notification messages may be sent with sd_notify(3) with a message string of "WATCHDOG=1".

If the unset_environment parameter is non-zero, sd_watchdog_enabled() will unset the $WATCHDOG_USEC and $WATCHDOG_PID environment variables before returning (regardless of whether the function call itself succeeded or not). Those variables are no longer inherited by child processes. Further calls to sd_watchdog_enabled() will also return with zero.

If the usec parameter is non-NULL, sd_watchdog_enabled() will write the timeout in µs for the watchdog logic to it.

To enable service supervision with the watchdog logic, use WatchdogSec= in service files. See systemd.service(5) for details.

Return Value¶

On failure, this call returns a negative errno-style error code. If the service manager expects watchdog keep-alive notification messages to be sent, > 0 is returned, otherwise 0 is returned. Only if the return value is > 0, the usec parameter is valid after the call.

Notes¶

These APIs are implemented as a shared library, which can be compiled and linked to with the libsystemd pkg-config(1) file.

Internally, this functions parses the $WATCHDOG_PID and $WATCHDOG_USEC environment variable. The call will ignore these variables if $WATCHDOG_PID does not contain the PID of the current process, under the assumption that in that case, the variables were set for a different process further up the process tree.

Environment¶

History¶

The watchdog functionality and the $WATCHDOG_USEC variable were added in systemd-41.

sd_watchdog_enabled() function was added in systemd-209. Since that version the $WATCHDOG_PID variable is also set.

See Also¶

systemd(1), sd-daemon(3), daemon(7), systemd.service(5), sd_notify(3)