It’s been a long time since Marna and I recorded anything. So long in fact that I’d forgotten how to use my favoured audio editor Ferrite on iOS.

But it soon came back to me. Indeed the app has moved on somewhat since I last used it – in a number of good ways.

So, we’re back – in case you thought we’d gone away for good.

And here are the show notes. I hope you’ll find some interesting things here.

Episode 25 “Flit for Purpose”

Here are the show notes for Episode 25 “Flit for Purpose”. The show is called this because it relates to our Topic, and also can be related to our Mainframe topic (as a pun for “Fit for Purpose”).

It’s been a long time between episodes, for good reason

We’ve been all over the place, and too many to mention thanks to a very busy end of 2019, with two major GAs (z/OS V2.4 on September 30, 2019 and z15 September 23, 2019)

Twitter user @jaytay had a humorous poke at SMF field “SMF_USERKEYCSAUSAGE”, how it looks like sausage. We agree and are glad to find humor everywhere.

Follow up

We mentioned in Episode 24 CICS ServerPac in a z/OSMF Portable Software Instance Format . It GA’ed December 6 on ShopZ. If you will be ordering CICS or CICS program products, please order it in z/OSMF format!

Mainframe Topic: Highest highlights of z/OS V2.4 and z/OS on z15

Highlight 1: zCX zCX is a new z/OS address space that is running Linux on Z with the Docker infrastructure. Docker containers have become popular in the industry. Examples include nginx and MongoDB, and WordPress. (The use cases depicted reflect the types of software that could be deployed in IBM zCX in the future. They are not a commitment or statement of software availability for IBM zCX.)

Take Dockerhub image and run “as is”. About 3k images to choose from that can immediately run. vJust look for the “IBM Z” types.

The images are not necessarily from IBM, which brings about a “community” and “commonality” with Linux on Z.

zCX is packaged with SMP/E, and serviced with SMP/E. However, configuration (getting it up and running) and service updates must be done with z/OSMF Workflow.

Application viewpoint: Docker images themselves are accessed through the TCP/IP stack, with the standard Docker CLI using SSH. And for the application people they might not even know it’s running under z/OS. Docker Command Level Interface is where you implement which containers run in which zCX address spaces.

For cost: No SW priced feature (IFAPRDxx). However, does required a priced HW feature (0104, Container Hosting Foundation) on either z14 GA2 or z15. This is verified at the zCX initialization. Lastly, zCX cycles are zIIP-eligible

It’s an architectural decision whether to run Docker applications on Linux on Z or z/OS, and that’s for another episode. Martin wants to see some SMF data, naturally. He’s installed Docker on two different platforms: Mac and his Raspberry Pi. In the latter case he installed nginx and also gcc.

Highlight 2: z/OSMF Lots of z/OSMF enhancements that have arrived in z/OS V2.4, and the good news is that most of them are rolled back to V2.3 in PTFs that have been arriving quarterly.

Security Configuration Assistant: A way within z/OSMF to validate your security configuration with graphic views, on the user and user group level. Designed to work with all three External Security Managers! Security is and continues to be one of the hardest part of getting z/OSMF working . This new application itself has more security profiles that users of Security Configuration Assistant will need access to, but the good side is once those users are allowed, they can greatly help the rest. Use case: if a user is having problems accessing an application and you don’t know why you could easily see if this user had authority to access the application to eliminate that as a problem. Available back to V2.3 with APAR PH15504 and additional group id enhancements in APAR PH17871

Diagnostic Assistant for z/OSMF : A much simplier way to gather the necessary information to need for a Service person to perform debug for your z/OSMF problem. Not quite easy before. It could have been streamlined, and it took this application to give us that. It is now so easy. Now, Marna doesn’t gather problem doc grudgingly because there are lots of different locations that contain necessary diagnostic files. It could not be easier to use (although one additional tiny enhancement Marna has requested to the z/OSMF team how to make it even easier to not require the z/OSMF server jobname and jobid). You open up the Diagnostic Assistant application, you select the pieces of information you want to gather. This includes the configuration data, the job log, and server side log and some other files. Having z/OSMF collect it for you it really nice. It is then zipped up and stored down to your hard drive (not the z/OS system). Available back to V2.3 with Diagnostic Assistant APAR PH11606

Highlight 3: z/OS on z15: System Recovery Boost :Speeds up your shutdown for up to 30 minutes and speeds your re-IPL for 60 minutes, with no increase to your rolling four hour average. Some bits are free, some will cost should use choose to you them. Note that System Recovery Boost is available on z/OS V2.3 and V2.4. There is no priced z/OS SW feature (IFAPRDxx) at all. Made up of individual solutions, not all of them you may choose to use (or may apply to you). No charge for this one: Sub-capacity CPs will be boosted to full capacity. At full-capabity already, this will not help. No charge for this one: Use your entitled zIIPs for running workload that usually would not be allowed to run there (General CP workload). Martin will have updates to his zIIP Capacity Planning presentation! If you are a GDPS user, there is GDPS 4.2 scripting and firmware enhancements. This will allow parallelization of GDPS reconfiguration actions that may be part of your restart, reconfiguration, and recovery process. Martin notes that if you parallelise more than you otherwise would it might affect the resource picture. Lastly, and now this one is priced, if you want to, you can purchase HW features (9930 and 6802). These features will allow you to have extra temporary zIIP capacity which you can then make use of for even more boost processing. Additional reference: System Recovery Boost Redpaper Martin again, looks forward to seeing data from this as RMF could show some challenging things for his reporting.



Performance Topic: z15 from chip design on upwards

Disclaimer: personal view, not from Development or Marketing. Marna and Martin were talking about the z15 Chip design – and we thought those observations might be useful to include in the Performance topic. Mostly focusing on the CP chip, which is where the processor cores are.

Two traditional levers were raising clock speed or shrinking the feature size. z15 clock speed still 5.2 GHz. And we’ve been as high as 5.5 GHz with zEC12. Feature size still 14 nanometers (nm). Some other fabs have 10nm and even 7nm processes.

GHz and nm aren’t the be all and end all. Looking at chip design now. Start with a similar sized CP chip and putting more on it. It helped to get rid of the Infiniband-related circuits, and some layout enhancements. Very sophisticated software used for laying out all modern chips. Once you have more chip real estate, good stuff can happen. Same size CP chip has 3 billion more transistors, that’s 9.1 billion transistors. This can give us two more cores, taking us to twelve. As an aside, Martin has seen the two more cores on a z14 PU chip allow better Cycles-Per-Instruction (CPI) than on z13. More L2 Instruction Cache, at the core level. Double L3 Cache size, at the chip level, shared between cores. So almost double per core. All of this has got to lead to better CPI. Nest Acceleration Unit (NXU): Compression on this chip is such a fascinating topic, but for another episode. Drawer can go down from 5 or 6 PU chips to 4 and – for 1-drawer machine – still have one more purchasable core than z14 – 34 vs 33. 33 vs 34 is for 1 drawer. Similar things apply for two or more drawers. As a result they also were able to remove one set of X-Bus circuitry. The X-Bus is used to talk to other CP chips and the System Controller (SC) Chip. Now down from 3 to 2: one for the SC chip and one for the remaining other CP chip in the cluster. Now fit the contents of the drawer in an industry standard 19 inch (narrower) rack. This following what was on the z14 ZR1. At the top end there are up to 190 characterisable cores, coming up from 170. This can give us a fifth drawer – which is quite important. Speculation that reducing the number of PU chips enabled the System Controller (SC) chip to talk to four other SC chips, up from 3 in z14, getting us from 170 to 190. Many other things too: Like 40TB Max Memory at the high end vs 32TB, improved branch prediction so deeper processor design, and enhanced Vector processing with new instructions.



Topics Topic: How To Do A Moonlight Flit

This topic is about moving one’s social output, in particular blogs and podcast series. Martin’s blog had to move, because the IBM developerWorks blog site is being shut down. Many blogs moved to ibm.com, or elsewhere like Martin’s Mainframe Performance Topics. Marna’s blog remains in the same spot (Marna’s Musings. This podcast probably also has to move, for similar reasons, and we are looking for another location now. When we move it, the feed will have to be replaced in your podcast client, sadly.

Immediately people might worry about Request For Enhancements being affected , and it is not.

Following are the important criteria we thought, when selecting the right sight to move social media to: Cost, ideally it’d be free, but may be worth paying a few dollars a month for better service and facilities. Good ecosystem. Easy to use, especially for publishing a podcast. Good blog publishing tools, that integrating well with writing systems and good preview capabilities. Longevity is important. You do not want to migrate again soon. Martin has 15 years of blogging! Security. Our material is public, however tampering is the concern.

Moving the media: Retrieval from old location. Martin wrote some Python to webscrape the blog. He built a list of posts and retrieved their HTML. Graphics: The same python retrieved the graphics referenced in the blog posts. Podcasting needed show notes and keywords (for Search Engine Optimisation). Also audio and graphics. Cross references: Martin’s blogs have references from one post to another, both absolute and relative. And our podcast shownotes have links too that will break. Re-posting . A lot of HTML editing is required. Different posts using different authoring tools have different generated HTML, and had post-cross-references that needed refactoring. Martin’s graphics needed uploading afresh, and how they are positioned on the page had to change.

Redirecting Audience: We really don’t want to lose our listeners and readers! Martin posted progress reports on Twitter where there would be a trace. His blog’s root URL had to change. Fortunately the old blogging site redirected to the new, but not to individual posts. Our podcast subcribers will need to specify a new feed URL, as there is no possibility of not affecting subscriptions. Watch out for an announcement. New feed will likely cause all episodes to be re-downloaded. If you’re subscribing, once you re-subscribe to the new location, you should be fine for a long time. However, we don’t know how many we’ll lose. We don’t actually know how many people listen (e.g. on the web).

We try to turn such experiences into something useful.

Customer requirements

RFE 133491: “Write IEFC001I and IEFC002I information to SMF”

Abstract: At the point where IEFC001I and IEFC002I messages are produced, also write this information to SMF. The record should indicate if it was a cataloged procedure (the IEFC001I infomation) or an INCLUDE group, the member used, whether it came from a private or system library, and the dsname of that library, in addition to job identification information. Possibly the stepname should be included (names internal to a cataloged procedure are not needed).

Use Case: Organizations of long standing often have thousands of cataloged procedures. Often a large percentage of these are obsolete or never used but the mechanisms for discovering which ones should be archived or deleted do not exist as far as I can find. Being able to summarize SMF records to compare against member lists would allow us to clean up old cataloged procedures and/or INCLUDE members. This could also have security use if one suspects a malicious person had temporarily substituted a JCLLIB version of a proc.

Currently it is an Uncommitted candidate , moved from JES to BCP component for response.

The messages referenced were: IEFC001I (PROCEDURE procname WAS EXPANDED USING text) : The system found an EXEC statement for a procedure. In the message text… IEFC002I INCLUDE GROUP group-name WAS EXPANDED USING text: The system found an INCLUDE statement to include a group of JCL statements. In the message text:

Our thoughts: Martin thought it could be useful in SMF 30. Already have some stuff about PROCs and PROC STEPs in SMF 30. Some of the information, particularly data set, is quite lengthy. So probably an optional section in the record, maybe repeating. Might need some SMFPRMxx parameter. It looks useful, probably not a new record, needs care in designing. Marna likes it for two reasons: 1. Helpful in cleanup. and 2. Has security benefits.



Future conferences where we’ll be

Marna SHARE in Ft Worth, TX, February 23-28, 2020

Martin has no firm plans but highly likely he’ll take his first trip to Brazil.

On the blog

You can reach Marna on Twitter as mwalle and by email.

You can reach Martin on Twitter as martinpacker and by email.

Or you can leave a comment below. So it goes…