> Yes. That 'distributed SMF' thing, too ;)
>
> For me that would be an ability to see and influence service states on
remote envs (including neighboring other zones), so e.g. if a tracked
instance of database got up somewhere,
​> ​
start this appserver here (or the opposite for orderly shutdowns). I had
some clumsy PoCs back in the day, but nothing good to share except a few
ideas ;(

​I wrote a thing years ago that let you query and manage service states
over HTTP. It's not very sophisticated: it ends up shelling out to the
`svc*` commands, the security model is embarrassingly weak, but it did
work. It's not been touched in years, and shows its age, but it's still
around. https://github.com/snltd/SexyMF. It probably won't run unmodified
on a modern node platform.

The one thing I liked that you-know-who added to Solaris 11, was RAD, which
takes the concept much further, giving you an API to (pretty much) the
whole OS. I'd love to see something like that in SmartOS, used primarily to
make one SMF know what the others are doing, and react accordingly. Fire
off a message to other zones/hosts when the state of a service changes;
have those SMFs listen for and act on that message. You could do a lot with
that.

On the broader discussion, innovation is happening further up the stack
now, because most real-world work is being done several layers of
abstraction up from the OS. Change happens when people are deeply unhappy
with something, and I think people are pretty happy with their OS now.
That's assuming they ever even think about their OS.​ Which, generally,
they don't.

This, I think, is what's sealing the fate of non-linux operating systems.
It's not necessarily that people *prefer* linux, or could begin to argue
why it might be in some sense *better*, they just don't care what's at the
bottom of the stack.

The OS is becoming as unloved and out-of-sight-out-of-mind as the BIOS.
Where's the innovation in the BIOS? Your BIOS sucks, but how often do you
think about it? Where's the real-world pressure to innovate and disrupt?

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