smf(5): sun.com, new blogging, boot
We had our moment on sun.com last week, which was pretty gratifying: my first slides on doing this project are from June 2001, and I’m not certain how long before that—1997? 1998?—we started sketching out aspects of the problem. smf(5), which we developed under the codename “Greenline”, is now rolling out pretty well inside Sun, and with the inclusion of the Java Desktop System, makes for a nice fast workstation startup.
After being strapped into their ergonomic chairs for a year or two, people are understandably itchy to start explaining what they’ve been working on to others: Tobin‘s first entry suggests that he’s setting himself a lofty goal of touring the entire facility in his blog. I know Liane and a couple of others are ready to get the word out as well. But, being a dilettante at heart, I’ll just try to show some of the pieces I think are interesting.
The past couple of days I spent refining verbose boot, which let’s you see what services the system is starting and in what order (and what went wrong). I’m eliding some of the boring parts, but it looks roughly like this:
SunOS Release 5.10 Version smf-fixes-sparc 64-bit Copyright 1983-2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Use is subject to license terms. DEBUG enabled misc/forthdebug (467758 bytes) loaded [ system/filesystem/root:default starting (Root filesystem mount) ] [ network/pfil:default starting (pfil) ] [ network/loopback:default starting (Loopback network interface) ] [ network/physical:default starting (Physical network interfaces) ] Sep 15 16:26:33/11: system start time was Wed Sep 15 16:26:20 2004 [ system/filesystem/usr:default starting (/usr and / mounted read/write) ] [ system/device/local:default starting (Standard Solaris device configuration.) ] [ system/identity:node starting (System identity) ] [ system/filesystem/minimal:default starting (Local filesystem mounts) ] [ milestone/devices:default starting (Device configuration milestone.) ] Hostname: gremlins-b10 [ system/sysevent:default starting (System event notification service.) ] [ system/identity:domain starting (System identity) ] NIS domain name is mpklab.sfbay.sun.com [ system/cryptosvc:default starting (Cryptographic services) ] [ system/manifest-import:default starting (Service manifest import) ] [ system/rmtmpfiles:default starting (Remove temporary files) ] [ system/sysidtool:net starting (sysidtool) ] [ system/power:default starting (Power Management) ] [ system/keymap:default starting (Keyboard defaults) ] [ system/name-service-cache:default starting (Name service cache daemon) ] .... [ milestone/single-user:default starting (Single-user milestone) ] .... [ system/console-login:default starting (Console login) ] [ milestone/multi-user:default starting (Multi-user milestone) ] [ network/inetd:default starting (inetd) ] gremlins-b10 console login:
(On a Java Desktop System with GDM2 enabled, it just presents the GDM graphical login shortly after system/utmp is available.) One new aspect of boot is that the service “common” names are actually localizable although, since Solaris supports various splits between the root filesystem, /usr, and other filesystems, there’s a bit of hidden acrobatics involved. As another example, the reason we print out the start time is because, on this system, prior to that message, we can’t access the timezone data to convert the time-of-day to the local timezone. Fun.