shadowd is a daemon that provides background worker threads to migrate data for a shadow

migration. A shadow migration gradually moves data from a source file system into a new “shadow”

file system. Users can access and change their data within the shadow file system while migration is

occurring.

The shadowd service is managed by the service management facility, smf(5). Administrative actions

on this service, such as enabling, disabling, or requesting restart, can be performed using

svcadm(1M). The service's status can be queried using the svcs(1) command.

The svccfg(1M) command can be used to manage the following parameter related to shadowd:

config_params/shadow_threads

Note: Oracle Solaris 11: In this release, you can migrate data from an old file system to a new file

system while simultaneously allowing access and modification of the new file system during the

migration process.

Setting the shadow property on a new ZFS file system triggers the migration of the older data. The

shadow property can be set to migrate data from the local system or a remote system with either of

the following values:

file:///path

nfs://host:path

Reference: man shadowd