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Service Management Facility (SMF) in OpenSolaris

Skillful Service

Article from ADMIN 00/2010

By Harald Zisler

Linux and OpenSolaris have a number of differences. For example, OpenSolaris uses a version of the legacy System V Init to start and stop system services automatically.

For most Linux admins, it is a matter of course to type /etc/init.d/ and then press the Tab key to start or stop a service. On (Open)Solaris, this is handled by the Service Management Facility (SMF), which manages the background processes (daemons), among other things, thus replacing the legacy RC scripts that are familiar to Linux users. However, its functionality goes further. SMF also handles devices and milestones – that is, services derived from runlevels.

SMF supports standardized management tasks, such as starting and stopping services and handling errors. For this to happen, the Fault Management Resource Identifier (FMRI) identifies a service on the system. The service and instance name are passed to the FMRI as follows:

svc:/Service:Instance

In the following example,

svc:/network/login:rlogin

/network/login refers to the service and rlogin to the service instance. The details always start with svc: . The svc.startd daemon is the master process that starts and restarts the operating system. Services are assigned to the following categories:

Application
Milestone
Platform
Device
Network
Site
System

This classification is important for administrators who install applications outside of the package management system and want to use SMF to manage them. Each service entered here is also automatically assigned a status (see Table 1).

Table 1

Service Status