Hello, We've been discussing this issue for some time within NWAM and Clearview mailing alias. I think it's time to try to involve more people on this. So, I'm writing this email to seek some suggestions from you :).
A little bit background: We're trying to use smf instances to represent networking configuration in a system. Our current design is that one data link, or IP interface is represented by one smf instance. These individual instances look like svc:/network/datalink:<Clearview-UV name> and svc:/network/ip:<Clearview-UV name> respectively. They are spawned, respectively, by two management service instances: svc:/network/datalink-managment:default and svc:/network/ip-management:default, in response to request coming from sysadmin or kernel. And these individual instances are managed, after their creation, by policy engine service instance, such as svc:/network/physical:nwam. As we moving forward, we see a problem with this design: We found that it seems to be hard to follow this design when we try to represent temporary configuration with smf instances. Currently, all smf instances saved in repository are persistent, which means that they exist across reboot. While, instances created for "ifconfig" or "dladm -t create-xxx" should be considered as "temporary smf instances", which means that they should go away after next reboot. But, there seems to be no such concept as "temporary smf instance" in current smf model. So, if we do create these temporary instances, we have to explicitly remove them from smf repository before they go online during next reboot. We might be able to do this in those two management service instances since each individual instance should be created with a dependency on their management service. But, this does not sound like a good plan, tho. Or, for now, we choose not to create any smf instance for temporary configuration. We only represent persistent configuration via smf instances. Thus, we don't have to worry about removing them during next reboot. And we'll add temporary configuration support later when we have some support from smf framework to handle such temporary instance. But, the questions here are that: Is this an acceptable way to represent networking configuration? Do we have any plan to add temporary instance support in smf framework? Thanks in advance for your advice on this issue. Max
