I'm adding a new safety mechanism to an RTOS. It's a count-down timer which is decremented by the kernel, and when it reaches zero it signals that a task should exit.
For example, a task that normally takes 1000 ticks to complete could allocate one of these timers with a value of 2000. Then, when the value reaches zero, the task knows it has been running twice as long as normal (maybe because some hardware isn't responding), so it should exit.
Is there a usual name for this? If not, can someone suggest a name?