There are hardware watchdog implementations that offer this feature natively. There are two configurable intervals, a "soft" and a "hard" watchdog deadline. If

There are hardware watchdog implementations that offer this feature natively. There are two configurable intervals, a "soft" and a "hard" watchdog deadline. If you miss the soft deadline, you get a NMI, and you make the interrupt handler log whatever it can. If you miss the hard deadline, the whole thing resets. Fun story: I've only had this fail on me once. There was a hardware bug in the interrupt controller which caused the wrong vector to be invoked for NMIs.