Service Management Facility 'SMF' Product Page (Doc ID 1381453.1)

Last updated on JUNE 13, 2023

Applies to:

Solaris Operating System - Version 10 and later
Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit)
Oracle Solaris on x86-64 (64-bit)

Purpose

This document contains a collection of information about SMF

Scope

Description

Service Management Facility (SMF) is a feature of the Solaris operating system that creates a supported, unified model for services and service management on each Solaris system and replaces init.d scripts. SMF introduces:

Dependency order. Services sometimes depend on one another for proper operation, and a robust system should know each service's dependencies. If an underlying service fails, it needs to be corrected before other services that depend upon it are affected.
Configurable boot verbosity
Delegation of tasks to non-root users. A service can be configured to run within a limited set of privileges, rather than as the all-powerful root user. If a service has been broken into, the amount of damage that can be inflicted by the intruder will be minimized if the service's power is constrained to that of a more limited user.
Parallel starting of services. This speeds up the boot process by starting multiple services simultaneously, allowing idle CPU time resulting from a service that is temporarily blocked to be relinquished for use by other services that can start independently of the blocked service.
Automatic service restart after failure. Works in conjunction with the Solaris Fault Manager, allowing software recovery in the event of hardware faults (cpu, memory), admin error such as accidental kills, and software core dumps.

All these capabilities are made possible by treating Services as "first class objects". That is, they are more than just user executed software to the OS. They can be defined to have special states that allow finer control and permit monitoring and probing for diagnosing software failures, rather than having the administrator or dedicated "restarter" modules kill and restart the service as before.