Re: Opensolaris SMF for FreeBSD

David E. Thiel wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 05:52:29PM -0400, Randall Stewart wrote:
>> Anyone looked at porting SMF to FreeBSD?
> 
> Not to my knowledge. What do you feel that SMF offers that currently
> existing systems like rcNG or daemontools/runit do not? I haven't
> found SMF to be more useful or functional than those solutions, and
> it's certainly not as easy to use.

I agree. SMF has a lot of tools that go beyond basic service management
(service snapshots, "self-healing" ??, etc) but don't a lot of those SMF
features depend on base OS functionality that only is found Solaris?

If you need to have service management a bit abstracted from the base
system runit (smarden.org/runit/) makes it easy to write portable
startup scripts and handle logging in a (mostly) nice way. It doesn't
try to do too much - it's pretty simple. And it has a three-clause
BSDish license unlike more featureful systems like launchd :)  We use
runit quite a bit (on systems that run a small number of services) and
really like it - more than daemontools.

We also use runit as a replacement for init on some small footprint
linux boxes - it's statically linked against dietlibc and comes in at
around 10k in size!  I'd like to figure out how to shrink things a bit
on FreeBSD as well but there doesn't seem to be easy way to do that
(dietlibc is what makes it happen on Linux). Replacing init on FreeBSD
is possible as well but we haven't seen the need to do that.

cheers,