Linux: Starting the Watchdog Service With init
On Linux, the watchdog service can be automatically started during host boot by adding appropriate parameters to
the file /etc/default/virtualbox. There is one mandatory parameter,
VBOXWATCHDOG_USER, which must be set to the user which will later start the VMs. For backward
compatibility you can also specify VBOXBALLOONCTRL_USER.
The parameters in the following table all start with the VBOXWATCHDOG_ prefix string. For
example: VBOXWATCHDOG_BALLOON_INTERVAL and VBOXWATCHDOG_LOGSIZE. Legacy
parameters such as VBOXBALLOONCTRL_INTERVAL can still be used.
<ph conkeyref="vbox-conkeyref-phrases/product-name"/> Watchdog Configuration Parameters
Watchdog Configuration Parameters
Parameter
Description
Default
USER
The user which the watchdog service runs as
ROTATE
Number of log files, 0 disables log rotation
10
LOGSIZE
Maximum log file size to trigger rotation, in bytes
1MB
LOGINTERVAL
Maximum time interval to trigger log rotation, in
seconds
1 day
BALLOON_INTERVAL
Interval for checking the balloon size, in
milliseconds
30000
BALLOON_INCREMENT
Balloon size increment, in megabytes
256
BALLOON_DECREMENT
Balloon size decrement, in megabytes
128
BALLOON_LOWERLIMIT
Balloon size lower limit, in megabytes
64
BALLOON_SAFETYMARGIN
Free memory required for decreasing the balloon size,
in megabytes
1024