Service Management Facility (smf(5)) at OpenSolaris.org

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Community: Service Management Facility (smf(5))

OpenSolaris Community: Service Management Facility (smf(5))

Community Observers

Endorsed projects

Self-healing services are delivered and managed on Solaris with the Service Management Facility (smf(5)). smf(5) augments the existing init.d(4) and inetd(1M) startup mechanisms, promoting the service to a first-class operating system object.

Administrators can now:

view system-wide service status,
manage services, not just their individual processes,
access information about misconfigured/misbehaving services,
enable and disable services persistently across upgrades and patches,
delegate tasks to non-root users securely, and
more reliably access the console in repair scenarios.

smf(5) gives developers:

automated restart of services in dependency order due to administrative errors, software bugs, or uncorrectable hardware errors,
a single API for service management, configuration, and observation,
access to service-based resource management, and
simplified boot-process debugging.

This is the home base for the SMF community: users, system administrators, service authors, application developers, and SMF infrastructure contributors.

FAQ!

Check out the SMF FAQ (updated: 4/23/07)

Documents

Dive in and get started with the Solaris Service Management Facility - Quickstart Guide.
Learn to create your own smf(5) services in the Solaris Service Management Facility - Service Developer Introduction.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/
Review the smf(5) ARC policy when delivering services for OpenSolaris.
Peruse smf(5) Design Documents.

Forums:

Articles and Papers:

Solaris Service Management Facility: Modern System Startup and Administration. from The USENIX 19th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA '05).
Peter Baer Galvin's smf(5) Sys Admin article
Glenn Brunette's Restricting Service Administration blueprint

Bugs:

Bugs with the keyword smf

Test Suite:

Sparc package
i386 package
SMF Test Suite source tarball
SMF Test Suite source browsable

Announcements

02 Jun 2008	SMF Test Suite
20 Oct 2005	scfdot - An SMF dependency graph generator

Blogs

lianep - simplifying building ON on an OpenSolaris system

Apr 24, 11:28 AM

Most of my code lives in the OS/Net consolidation of OpenSolaris (also known as ON). That's true for a lot of other OpenSolaris developers as well, since the majority of the kernel, drivers, and core ...

sch - 2009.06: A netbook for meetings

Apr 21, 5:20 PM

It's been a busy few months, but things are clearing up now. The past few weeks, I've been using an Acer Aspire One for coverage when my trusty Toshiba r500 is recharging. It's my computer for ...

lianep - nothing like a small crisis to motivate an upgrade to OpenSolaris

Apr 8, 11:58 AM

Like many other folks, we've got a small server at home which runs nameservice for our personal domain along with mail and even a webserver from time to time. To my shame (or just as a testament to ...

lianep - faster imports

Mar 16, 2:25 PM

Steve Peng has done something really cool. He's taken the slowest part of the first-boot experience and made it many *times* faster than it was. This happened quite a while ago in Nevada/OpenSolaris, ...

sch - 2008.11: terminator is my favourite application

Dec 23, 11:49 AM

There's a lot of new applications in 2008.11— cheese is useful for testing your USB webcam and making self-portraits for avatars and profile pictures and I'm very intrigued by gobby —but I already ...