Specifying System Changes on Package Actions

First determine which actions should cause a change to the system when they are installed, updated, or removed. For example, some system changes are needed to implement the software self-assembly concept described in Software Self-Assembly.

For each of those package actions, determine which existing SMF service provides the necessary system change. Alternatively, write a new service that provides the needed functionality and ensure that service is delivered to the system as described in Delivering an SMF Service.

When you have determined the set of actions that should cause a change to the system when they are installed, tag those actions in the package manifest to cause that system change to occur. The value of a tag that causes system change to occur is called an actuator.

The following actuator tags can be added to any action in a manifest:

reboot-needed

This actuator takes the value true or false. This actuator declares that update or removal of the tagged action must be performed in a new boot environment if the package system is operating on a live image. Creation of a new boot environment is controlled by the be-policy image property. See the “Image Properties” section in the pkg(1) man page for more information about the be-policy property.

SMF Actuators

These actuators are related to SMF services.

SMF actuators take a single service FMRI as a value, possibly including globbing characters to match multiple FMRIs. If the same service FMRI is tagged by multiple actions, possibly across multiple packages being operated on, IPS only triggers that actuator once.

The following list of SMF actuators describes the effect on the service FMRI that is the value of each named actuator:

disable_fmri

Disable the specified service prior to performing the package operation.

refresh_fmri

Refresh the specified service after completing the package operation.

restart_fmri

Restart the specified service after completing the package operation.

suspend_fmri

Temporarily suspend the specified service prior to performing the package operation, and enable the service after completing the package operation.