Solaris Service Management Facility
It is a feature of the Solaris OS to support unified approach to start, stop and manage services with dependencies while easily replacing the init.d style service management.
SMF introduces:
Dependency order. Services sometimes depend on one another for proper operation, and a robust system should know each service's dependencies. If an underlying service fails, it needs to be corrected before other services that depend upon it are affected.
Configurable boot verbosity
Delegation of tasks to non-root users. A service can be configured to run within a limited set of privileges, rather than as the all-powerful root user. If a service has been compromised, the amount of damage that can be inflicted by the intruder will be minimized if the service's power is constrained to that of a more limited user.
- Parallel starting of services. This speeds up the boot process by starting multiple services simultaneously, allowing idle CPU time resulting from a service that is temporarily blocked to be relinquished for use by other services that can start independently of the blocked service. Automatic service restart after failure. Works in conjunction with the Solaris Fault Manager, allowing software recovery in the event of hardware faults (cpu, memory), admin error such as accidental kills, and software core dumps.
Further reading at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Management_Facility
Overview at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-1985/6mhm8o5rh?a=view
