Changes in Behavior When Using SMF

Most of the features that are provided by SMF happen behind the scenes, so users are not aware of them. Other features are accessed by new commands. Here is a list of the behavior changes that are most visible.

• The boot process creates many fewer messages now. Services do not display a message by default when they are started. All of the information that was provided by the boot messages can now be found in a log file for each service that is in /var/svc/log. You can use the svcs command to help diagnose boot problems. In addition, you can use the -v option to the boot command, which generates a message when each service is started during the boot process.

• Since services are automatically restarted if possible, it may seem that a process refuses to die. If the service is defective, the service will be placed in maintenance mode, but normally a service is restarted if the process for the service is killed. The svcadm command should be used to stop the processes of any SMF service that should not be running.

• Many of the scripts in /etc/init.d and /etc/rc*.d have been removed. The scripts are no longer needed to enable or disable a service. Entries from /etc/inittab have also been removed, so that the services can be administered using SMF. Scripts and inittab entries that are provided by an ISV or are locally developed will continue to run. The services may not start at exactly the same point in the boot process, but they are not started before the SMF services, so that any service dependencies should be OK.