And don't forget that the ESA/390 POP is still out there in online BookMangler, too.
Sometimes you can decipher by looking at the ancient announcement summaries (which are archived on the IBM web site) when a particular feature was introduced. As an example, I believe R&I? I&R? instructions came in 1991, but it was about 1995/6 before you could be guaranteed that all IBM-supported processors had them. And even then, there might have been the plug-compatible that was System/360 and running MVS/SP 1.3 still (*cough* Brasil *cough* ICM *cough*). Later, Ray -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Comstock Sent: Friday October 06 2006 08:06 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: MVCLE Use 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
