This reminds me of a question I've wanted to post for a while: Does anyone have an "easy" way of determining when an instruction became "GA" in the chronology of 370/390/zArch hardware? MVCLE, for example, is listed in Rev 4 edition of the ESA/390 POPs, as part of the "Compare-and-Move-Extended Facility" and thus would produce an operation exception if that facility was not installed. In the zArch POPs, there's no such qualification. Since I haven't kept copies of all of the various POPs and revision levels between these two, I cannot determine at what "architectural level" the instruction became "generally available." Since I write a lot of code for commercial MVS products, I often run across circumstances where one of the "newer" instructions would be useful. But, since these products are widely used, I need to be certain that the code will run on all of the CPUs owned by the customers of those products. (Special circumstances might justify dual-pathing, but usually, my rule of thumb is an instruction should be GA for at least 10 years.) I was bit last year by ALC and SLB, so a good method of determining the availability of an instruction throughout the installed CPU base out there would be very useful.
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