smf(5): Recent (and open) developments

Keeping up with the technical discussions on opensolaris.org probably requires a full time team. Even with Glynn‘s weekly news and Eric‘s list summaries, I’m still not able to track it all—which shouldn’t be a surprise, as I couldn’t track everything when it was all closed (and somewhat smaller). In the various areas close to smf(5), there have been some developments worth mentioning.

David Bustos unveiled the Enhanced SMF Profiles project. There have been some clear shortcomings in our current use of configuration snapshots across upgrade operations, and enhanced profiles will clear these up very nicely. (But, like any well thought out feature, enhanced profiles will make a number of other configuration manipulation problems much more tractable.)

One such consumer will be the Network Auto-Magic project, which John Beck has been pursuing. The NWAM team recently released an initial prototype, which is letting them explore some of the issues—architectural, usability, generality—with making such a broad change.

I need to review the source to the iwi wireless driver to see whether it issues the appropriate DL_NOTE_LINK_UP and DL_NOTE_LINK_DOWN notifications to ip

Finally, we’ve long discussed extending the <template> section of the smf(5) service manifests with various forms of metadata that we believe might be useful to management software. Dave Powell wrote and released a draft discussion of template extensions under the auspices of the Visual Panels project. These properties will be useful to other smf(5) commands as well—svccfg(1M) being one of the most obvious target consumers.

Not all smf(5) work can be done virtually. Last month, Liane had a good trip to SANE 2006. She’s posted the slides from her tutorial as well.

Probably need to get out there talking again soon myself.

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris smf ]