Service Management Facility (smf(5))

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.

Oracle Solaris 11 also has many improvements to SMF, and we'll be talking about those improvements in blogs and articles.  They'll be linked below as they arrive.  In the meantime, many of these improvements are described formally in the Solaris Administration Guide.

This is the home base for the SMF community: users, system administrators, service authors, and application developers.  Future information about SMF is not described here, and some documents about internal design or futures may be archival only.  The SMF development team, many service developers, and SMF users continue to have technical conversation on the smf-discuss@opensolaris.org mailing list.  If you're interested in asking questions about SMF or just participating in the conversation, sign up for smf-discuss.

Documents

• Solaris Administration Guide: Managing Services Overview.
• Solaris Administration Guide: Managing Services Tasks.
• Review the smf(5) ARC policy when delivering services for OpenSolaris.
• Peruse {smf(5) Design Documents.

Blogs

• The SMF team is blogging at http://blogs.oracle.com/SolarisSMF/.
• Historically, there's more SMF information archived at http:/blogs.oracle.com/lianep, http://blogs.oracle.com/sch/, and http://blogs.oracle.com/jwadams/.

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
• How to Create an SMF Manifest
• Service Management Facility How to Guide

FAQ!

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