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Status Future consideration
Workspace z/OS
Categories LE
Created by Guest
Created on Oct 16, 2020

RELATED IDEAS

LE to allow UNIX System Services to interrupt an LE program utilizing Pause/Release

LE to allow UNIX System Services to interrupt an LE program utilizing Pause/Release.

System: LE on z/OS USS

Actor: SAP support experts or any other USS C code developer with the necessity to debug the stack trace of a process

SAP support experts want to use dbx -a <processId> to get program stack traces on single and multi-threaded processes like the SAP Enqueue Server (enserver), for example to analyse performance issues.
This is currently -ONLY- possible with Business interruption. Either the process has to be stopped and restarted to use a specific environment variable, if the support expert happens to know, or if not, even worse, the process gets killed by attaching dbx. This is not acceptable for our large banking clients for example. The Enqueue Server is a core component of SAP. Crashing as well as stopping and restart results in a Business outage and clean-up operations.

For SAP Enqueue Server you have to define the environment variable _CEE_CONDWAIT_PAUSE=NO in an SAP profile and to restart it in order to be able to switch sucessfully to all threads of this process. Otherwise the dbx fails with ptrace return codes: ret=-1, errno=143, errno_jr=0x0d3d017f and Enqueue Server crashes too. In this case SAP support experts cannot easily interpret why the dbx fails.

So if a SAP support expert advices the customer to run dbx on this SAP process as on any other platform, it will crash,  meaning an unplanned outage of SAP for some time  and  cleanup activities.  This is not acceptable for a business critical application like SAP on Z.  Clients run SAP on Z actually to avoid such unplanned outages.

This behaviour of dbx is obviously caused by changes made with LE APAR OA55202 (PTF UA96854 for z/os 2.3). Before this APAR and on z/OS release 2.2 and prior dbx -a worked fine for multithread processes.
Allowing UNIX System Services to interrupt an LE program utilizing Pause/Release might help dbx to deal with multithreaded processes.

Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Nov 24, 2020

    .Hi Volker, the only thing LE can do is to avoid using Pause/Release by default, that is change default value of _CEE_CONDWAIT_PAUSE to NO.
    That has the same effect with specifying _CEE_CONDWAIT_PAUSE=NO explicitly in application.
    Our concern is there could be performance degradation, I think this is also your concern.
    The real solution has to be covered by z/OS USS kernel component. They has another RFE open, see below link:
    https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=144810

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Nov 24, 2020

    Hi, is there any progress? regards, Volker.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Nov 1, 2020

    This item is not in our plans but is being kept in our backlog.

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