A project has been started to use Sun's Service Management Facility SMF to manage Ubuntu packages on OpenSolaris-based platforms. SMF is the way to manage system services in Solaris/OpenSolaris. The project is an effort to enable SMF as the default service management for Ubuntu packages on OpenSolaris-based deriviations such as NexentaOS.

SMF has a very complete featureset and could one day replace the current init.d/rc scripts. Self-healing services are a built-in feature of SMF, there is no need for custom watchdogs or /etc/inittab hacks. SMF augments the existing init.d and inetd startup mechanisms, promoting services to first-class operating system objects. One extremely nice feature of SMF is that service state changes are recorded in the system, which means that all services that were started by SMF will automatically be restarted at boot. Also, services can be started in parallel with SMF, resulting in shortened boot times.

Related links

• Sun Solaris Availability features
• OpenSolaris community project SMF
• NexentaOS Ubuntu port of SMF
• Sun BigAdmin: SMF and predictive self-healing
• InitNG on Ubuntu

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