The watchdog feature enables initial startup and shutdown of the framework in a separate thread with defined time-out (mbs.core.timeout) for starting and stopping of each bundle.

The main goal of the watchdog feature is to prevent from the following situation – if during initial framework startup/shutdown a bundle from the initially-loaded set hangs in the start or stop method of its activator, the whole framework will not start or stop correctly. This feature can be turned on (default) and off by using the mbs.watchdog system property.