System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

Service Management Configuration Library Interfaces

SMF provides a set of programming interfaces that are used to interact with the service configuration repository through the svc.configd daemon. This daemon is the arbiter of all requests to the local repository datastores. A set of fundamental interfaces is defined as the lowest level of interaction possible with services in the service configuration repository. The interfaces provide access to all service configuration repository features such as transactions and snapshots.

Many developers only need a set of common tasks to interact with SMF. These tasks are implemented as convenience functions on top of the fundamental services to ease the implementation burden.