Hard Loop in ACF2 module ACF0AENT within ACF00SVA

Products

• ACF2
• ACF2 - MISC
• ACF2 - z/OS

Issue/Introduction

After applying ACF2 maintenance, when the system is IPLed it does not fully start as it appears BPXINIT is looping.  IBM reviewed a standalone dump of the LPAR and determined that tasks were in a looping in ACF0AENT within ACF00SVA. What is causing this?

Environment

Release : 16.0

Resolution

After maintenance was applied, the aliases for ACF00SVA were incorrect, leading to a hard loop in ACF2. This can occur either due to an unresolved failure when applying maintenance, or an error when copying the maintenance libraries over to the runtime libraries.

To verify the aliases for ACF00SVA, run an AMBLIST job against the CAX1LINK library:

//STEP1   EXEC PGM=AMBLIST                              
//SYSLIB    DD  DISP=SHR,DSN=your.acf2hlq.CAX1LINK
//SYSPRINT  DD  SYSOUT=*                             
//SYSIN     DD  *                                    
  LISTLOAD OUTPUT=XREF,MEMBER=ACF00SVA               
//                                                   

As an example, this is output from a working system:

MEMBER NAME:  ACF00SVA
LIBRARY:      SYSLIB  
    ** ALIASES **     
      ACF0AVAL        
      ACF00VSR        

The AMBLIST from the looping system showed:

MEMBER NAME:  ACF00SVA
LIBRARY:      SYSLIB  
    ** ALIASES **     
      ACF00VSR