xenwatchdogd(8)

✨ NAME ✨

okay bestie, you're reading the xenwatchdogd(8) page 💖 and xenwatchdogd is the Xen hypercall based watchdog daemon. That's the whole vibe.

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

xenwatchdogd [ OPTIONS ] <TIMEOUT> [ <SLEEP> ]

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea, and it's highkey important: xenwatchdogd arms the Xen watchdog timer to TIMEOUT every SLEEP seconds. 🔥

If the xenwatchdogd process dies or is delayed for more than TIMEOUT seconds, then Xen will take the on_watchdog action specified in the domain configuration (peep xl.cfg(5)). And if xenwatchdogd is running in dom0, the whole system will reboot 😭 — yes, the whole thing. main character energy, but make it watchdog.

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -h, --help — displays a help message 🫶
• -F, --foreground — runs in the foreground. the default behaviour is to daemonize 🌈
• -x, --safe-exit — disables the watchdog on orderly exit. the default behaviour is to arm the watchdog to 300 seconds to allow time for the domain to shutdown. also see the SIGNALS section 🎀
• timeout — the number of seconds to arm the Xen watchdog timer. this must be set to a minimum of two 🔥
• sleep — the number of seconds to sleep in between calls to arm the Xen watchdog timer. this must be at least one second, and less than the timeout value. if not specified, it defaults to half the timeout value 💤

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🚨 SIGNALS 🚨

• SIGUSR1 — will cause the program to disarm the watchdog timer and exit, regardless of whether the --safe-exit option was passed 💀

⚠️ bestie, notice the "regardless" there — SIGUSR1 is not asking for permission, it's just doing its thing and exiting.

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Citrix Ltd and other contributors. iconic behaviour, no cap 🫶

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from Xen's 4.20.5-pre source, dated 2026-10-16 — and that's the xenwatchdogd(8) page, byeee 💜💅