How is QO72665 related to the Z9 technology? Why is it required?

Products

• Easytrieve Report Generator

Issue/Introduction

Since Easytrieve is not affected by operating system upgrades, this knowledge document explains why this PTF QO72665 is required for Easytrieve Plus to run with the Z9 processor.

After the upgrade of the operating system, an abend which is usually a S0C4 in EZTPA22 occurs in the compilation of an Easytrieve program.

The problem is not due to any incompatibility with any new versions of operating systems. This problem occurs when combining a DEFINE statement that contains a VALUE parameter with another parameter following the VALUE parameter. For example:

DEFINE FLD! W 4 N VALUE 0 MASK '99.99'

If the MASK '99.99' is removed, the abend does not occur.

 

Environment

Easytrieve Plus Report Generator, release 6.4

Resolution

This problem occurs in very unique scenarios (please see above description) where the compiler for  Easytrieve Plus used zero as the address of a parsing-related control block.

This problem results in the byte at address X'00000016' testing various Easytrieve Plus bit settings by the EZT DEFINE statement parser.

Before the new Z9 processor, that one byte always contained a '0'. This allowed Easytrieve to properly parse the DEFINE statement.

Storage for the Z9 processor is laid out differently and unpredictable results may occur. The most common is a S0C4 abend.

QO72665 must be applied to release 6.4 0311. This situation only exists with release 6.4. There are no reported problems with r11.x.