Quoth Kyle McDonald on Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 05:33:22PM -0400: > So as I undertssand it now, there is some 'middle' location where the > settings are cached, and service startup reads the setting from there, > and not directly out of SMF? I knew about 'refresh' and thought it was > great for triggering running processes to reread their config, but as > rebooting (and 'restart') involve the service starting up from scratch > it was my understanding that that would include rereading the config.
You should think of it as the SMF repository having two configuration areas for each service. One is the official configuration that service implementations are supposed to read, known as the "running snapshot", and the other is where users can make changes (variously referred to as the "editing" configuration, "pending" configuration, "current" configuration, or "directly attached" configuration). When a user is done with the changes he commits them to the running snapshot with the "refresh" operation. We chose this configuration model over the one most users are accustomed to in a tradeoff between usability and safety. With this system, if the OS panics while you're in the middle of the change, the service implementation won't see partially-updated configuration. > I just re-read the man page, and even after that it's not clear to me > that 'refresh' is needed even when your're planning on rebooting. Unless > I'm missing something it basically described exactly what I said above. If it's not clear, then please file a bug against the manpage. David
