OpenSolaris™ Bible

Chapter 13. Service Management

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Processes and services

• Service manifests and methods

• Service management commands

• Restarters and the SMF repository

• Customizing SMF services

Since the first versions of UNIX in 1969, one of the core abstractions in the operating system is the process, used to provide multi-programming and scheduling of system resources. OpenSolaris, of course, continues to use the process for essentially the same purposes as earlier versions of UNIX. However, beginning with Solaris 10, a higher-level abstraction called a service has become central to the system administration model. Chapter 3 briefly introduced the idea of services and the most basic commands used to manipulate them. Chapter 12 described fault management, which together with service management, provides the predictive self-healing feature of OpenSolaris. In this chapter, you'll gain an in-depth understanding of OpenSolaris service management and learn how to develop your own services.

Processes and Services

Considering the deep roots of the process model in UNIX and the commonality it represents with other operating systems, it's logical to ask why OpenSolaris has added the concept of a service to the system. After all, a service is implemented in terms of processes, so what does the service provide that a process doesn't?

The highly oversimplified answer to this question is that not all processes are equally important. After all, a process is created to execute almost every command that you ...