[MinnowBoard] MinnowBoard Turbot Watchdog

[Ken Tait]

It would be difficult to implement this using a standard, hardware 
watchdog timer when running an OS like linux or windows. The reason is 
there is no clear place to reset the watchdog since many threads will be 
running. In an embedded system, the watchdog is usually only reset once, 
in the 'main'. With an OS there is no main....

A better approach might be to start a chron timer at startup (which will 
be the watchdog) ,which will trigger some kind of simple flag/operation 
to check if your app is still running. Maybe checking the pid of the app 
may be of some help. If your app is locked, then the chron app can 
gracefully take the OS down and force a physical reset. At least this 
way, any open files can get flushed and not screw up the inode tables.

just a thought
Ken