Art Celestini wrote:
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.
Well the POO is a reasonable source. In the Summary of
Changes in the Prefix is the list of recent additions;
in Chapter 1 is a pretty thorough discussion of "Additions
to z/Architecture", then "The ESA/390 Base" followed by
"The ESA/370 and 370-XA Base". These should, collectively,
give you a pretty good idea. Then, in the actual instruction
write ups there is often a note as to what facility an
instruction belongs, so you can place it in time.
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
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