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

Announcements

20 Oct 2005

scfdot - An SMF dependency graph generator

Blogs

dep - Visual Panels in OpenSolaris 2008.05

May 7, 1:19 AM

For a while I've been working on a project to ease OpenSolaris configuration called Visual Panels (with Steve and Tony , and a great deal of patience, insight, and fastidiously gathered data from ...

sch - CommunityOne: here and there

May 5, 12:38 AM

Sunday I spent at Moscone, teaching laptops and projectors to get along. Saturday, Nathaniel, Benjamin, and I dropped in for lunch at the Developer Summit. I managed to talk with a few people before ...

sch - 2008.05: More ways to get it

May 5, 12:11 AM

As I did for the preview releases, I'll collect links to mirror sites here. These will also get links on the various download pages out there. Bart and I just finished updating the package repository ...

sch - Live chat on #os200805

May 1, 1:00 PM

We're talking about OpenSolaris 2008.05 over on IRC, using the #os200805, from now until 2 p.m. Pacific Time. If you haven't got an IRC client, you can use freenode's Java applet , which worked great ...

sch - OpenSolaris: Bug dependencies and release management

Apr 17, 5:38 PM

Right now, if you're subscribed to any of the Installation and Packaging community group or project lists, you'll see a lot of commit notifications as the various teams attempt to fix various bugs ...