The Oracle Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF) framework manages system and application services. SMF manages critical system services essential to the working operation of the system and manages application services such as a database or Web server. SMF improves the availability of a system by ensuring that essential system and application services run continuously even in the event of hardware or software failures.
SMF replaces the use of configuration files for managing services and is the recommended mechanism to use to start applications. SMF replaces the init scripting start-up mechanism, inetd.conf configurations, and most rc?.d scripts. SMF preserves compatibility with existing administrative practices wherever possible. For example, most customer and ISV-supplied rc scripts still work the same way they worked without SMF.
This chapter describes:
Capabilities of SMF
New features in this release
Concepts and components of SMF
Configuration files versus SMF services
How to gain privileges you need to use some SMF commands
For information about developing custom SMF services, see Developing System Services in Oracle Solaris 11.4.