>In what way do they say PSA is a common area of every address space when
>there is a unique PSA for every processor ?

"common area for every address space" has nothing to do with "processor". 
It says that no matter what address space you are in you can access fields 
in the PSA. And that is true. That is unlike "private area" where the 
private storage at address X in an address space has no necessary 
correlation to the private storage at address X in another address space.

PSA is an MVS (probably older than that, actually) term. It has not to my 
knowledge ever varied from "prefixed save area". Within there you will 
also see "FLC" for "Fixed Low Core". Neither of these is an architectural 
term.

As was mentioned, prefixing is a hardware function, provided so that 
programs could use the same address (e.g., 0) but get to a different area 
per processor. Many fields in the PSA are the same in every processor's 
PSA (e.g., the address of the CVT), but many are different (e.g, the 
address of the home TCB, the address of the home ASCB, the address of the 
LCCA). 

It is true that in between instructions (when not disabled for I/O and 
external interrupts) your work unit could be moved to another processor 
where it would then reference a different PSA. But for the most part the 
program is expected not to care -- for the things that the program needs, 
the PSA is expected to be "correct" on whichever processor the program is 
dispatched.

When a work unit is undispatched from one processor and redispatched on 
another, about the only "normal" things updated in the PSA are the home 
TCB and home ASCB addresses. Another thing that is updated is the FRR 
stack. The FRR stack is saved upon undispatch and the "target PSA's" FRR 
stack is set up from that saved FRR stack to accompany the redispatch. 
There are some other things that are updated upon redispatch related to 
the status of the work unit; those are not used as frequently by 
applications.

Peter Relson
z/OS Core Technology Design


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