vSphere HA depends on a heartbeat mechanism, which I believe is supplied by guest tools.
We wish to leverage HA to implement container restart policies - for that we need heartbeat.

I would like to add this into the library that also provides rpctool function as I believe the low level comms mechanisms are the same - if I'm incorrect perhaps this can be a separate library.

My intent is that this library be used by tether - tether will check for the liveliness of the processes it's responsible for, and if those are present and responsive the heartbeat continues. 'checking' the liveliness may be as simple as watching for SIGCHLD, or a more involved check.