1. CMG This Week
2. Update to Red Alert for CICS Transactions Using PL/I or C/C++
1. CMG This Week
We hope that many of you will be attending the annual conference of the Computer Measurement Group (CMG) this week in Orlando, Florida. Cheryl will be there for part of the week, and will be participating in a couple of sessions on Thursday, December 8th:
8:00 a.m. – z990 and z9-109 Performance and Capacity Issues
We still receive many questions from readers about performance issues related to these new processors. They can provide the performance you expect – assuming you do your planning correctly. Come and join Cheryl as she gives our latest recommendations on this important issue.
3:45 p.m. – zSeries Performance Q & A
If you still have questions after a full week of material, bring them to this session. Cheryl and a panel of recognized performance experts will try to provide some help for your problems and answers to your questions.
You can view the full CMG agenda at http://www.cmg.org. Cheryl would love to say hello to all of our readers, so please drop by if you have a minute on Thursday.
2. Update to Red Alert for CICS Transactions Using PL/I or C/C++
In our previous Cheryl’s List we mentioned a Red Alert that deals with a potential loss of data when running CICS transaction programs that were compiled with the Enterprise PL/I or the C/C++ compilers. Both of these compilers support an AFP (Additional Floating Point) compiler option that allows the use of twelve additional floating-point registers. All of the z/OS task-switching routines support the saving and restoring of these registers, but CICS does its own task switching and does not preserve them. That means that a CICS transaction program could lose control, and then receive control back again with different values in the AFP registers. The Red Alert mentions maintenance that needs to be applied to each compiler, plus new compiler options that should be used after the maintenance is applied so that the AFP registers are maintained.
The Red Alert also promised that IBM would be providing a utility program that would help identify those programs that need to be recompiled to avoid this problem. On November 23, 2005, an updated Red Alert was issued announcing the availability of that program.
To read both Red Alerts, visit http://techsupport.services.ibm.com/server/redAlerts to find the Red Alert for ‘AFP issue’ and ‘Update: AFP issue’. The updated alert also contains information for downloading the tool that may be used to identify the programs that will need to be recompiled. Please read this alert today if you have programs that could be affected by this serious problem.
Stay tuned!