Just a fyi if you're going down that path, the hardware watchdog is disabled by default in most distros. Enable it using RuntimeWatchdogSec. Second, if you ar

Just a fyi if you're going down that path, the hardware watchdog is disabled by default in most distros. Enable it using RuntimeWatchdogSec. Second, if you are running an important service, see if it can support systemd notification socket and even better the software watchdog protocol with systemd. The service just has to send a heart-beat every X seconds otherwise systemd will restart it. This ties in the hw watchdog to systemd and systemd watches your service, ensuring both the hardware and the software is running, otherwise the system will restart. Lots of details here: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/watchdog.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/watchdog.html None of this is raspberry pi specific, it works on every system with a supported hardware watchdog, which includes raspberry pis.