Prior to Beaker 23, when a recipe's system was rebooted it would start the first task in the recipe. That had the very important side effect of setting the watchdog time (to 50 minutes usually, which was the task time for /distribution/install + 30 minutes, see also bug 
1138486).

As part of introducing the new Installing status (bug 991245), we no longer start the first task to indicate the installation has started:

https://git.beaker-project.org/cgit/beaker/commit/?id=0f055ba9961ab218656af20e01725f12043a7e9a

The watchdog time *is* now set when the install_started call happens, which covers most cases, but we do also need the watchdog time to be set immediately after rebooting in case the system never actually powers on (or fails to netboot properly, etc).

For now we could hardcode 50 minutes as the initial watchdog time, to restore the previous behaviour, with bug 1138486 as the RFE for making that configurable.