What is the purpose of the Common Services for z/OS Common System Symbol Service?

Products

• COMMON SERVICES FOR Z/OS
• 90S SERVICES
• Common Services

Issue/Introduction

It is possible that one or more Broadcom Mainframe products may use additional system symbols similar to those provided by the operating system itself.  The Common Services CAMASTER provides a method for these products to create, set, and use these symbols

What purpose does Common Services Common System Symbol Service serve?   

 
 

 

Environment

Common Services operating in a z/OS environment using system symbols. 

Cause

Some Broadcom Mainframe products use System Symbols not provided by the z/OS Operating System(s) 

Resolution

The Common System Symbols Service lets Broadcom Mainframe products create, set, and use more system symbols similar to those defined by the z/OS operating system
It acts as an optional extension of entries found in SYS1.PARMLIB(IEASYSMxx) .  

The Common System Symbol Service simply adds the following symbols to those that already exist:

VMUSERID - If the system is executing as a guest of a VM system, then this contains the Userid of the VM system. If not a guest, you'll see a value of ++++++.
LPARNAME - The name of the LPAR where this is executing.
HRDWNAME - The hardware name from IODF.
SMFID - SMFID as defined on the SID parameter in SRMPRMxx. This becomes available after the SMF address space successfully initializes.
OSLEVEL - A 6 character value consisting of the OS version, release, and modlevel.

The following variables are not made part of the static system symbol table but are available in the PARMLIB "IF" logic.

OSNAME - Operating System product name.
OSNMVR - A concatenation of OSNAME and OSLEVEL.

If you have a separate application to define these symbols dynamically, you can suppress their automatic definition by editing the CAIMST00 member in SYS1.PARMLIB. Simply locate the SYSSYM parm and change the default value of SYSSYM (YES) to SYSSYM (NO). Please keep in mind, however, that this change will not go into effect until after the next IPL.

 

Additional Information

The Common Services r15.0 documentation provides the details on the Common System Symbols Service