First it is not a new softdog. This adds function that do other actions than a reboot. It intended to be used to help userspace management and monitoring going but can be used standalone too. The idea is to use watchdog interface, instead of reboot, a timer function do a softer action. In this case it is using oom_score_adj to pick a task to kill. So this is assuming that watchdog kicker is not respoding due to high memory pressure. A other usecase might be a selecting a task from a UID or what ever is problematic, it does not have to be a memory issue. But core thing is to have other actions than hard reboot. The patch need more works, but it can be tested as it is.
