A service model is related to the supported service restart capabilities of the service restarter associated to a service. At the SMF development level, the interface to the default service restarter is achieved by certain overrides to a special property group known as startd of type framework. This way, it's possible to communicate to the framework, which service model the service restarter should apply to the given service.
Documentation about the service models supported by svc.startd seems old and scarce. In essence, it's supported by the duration property of the startd special property group.
Currently, 3 service models have been documented:
- Contract (default)
The usual daemons that should run forever.
Death of all processes is an error and will trigger a restart.
- Wait
A service that runs for the lifetime of the child process.
When that child process exit the service is restarted.
- Transient
Usually a first-run / one-time service.
Example: a configuration and/or cleanup service.
The SMF framework won't bother maintaining availability.
Example:
...
<service type="service" version="..."
name="..." >
...
<!-- must come before the stability tag, if present -->
<property_group type="framework" name="startd" >
<propval type="astring"
name="duration" value="transient" />
</property_group >
...
</service >
...
NOTE
Another possibly useful property of svc.startd is ignore_error, specially when the given instance has sub-processes from which eventual coredumps aren't to be considered faults meriting SMF attention or to which external kill signals are not to be considered as errors by SMF.
Example:
<propval type="astring"
name="ignore_error" value="core,signal" />
NOTE
Beyond svc.startd (the default restarter), Solaris 11.3 documentation also refers to a svc.periodicd restarter, which seems to behave similarly to crontab.
