Bob Rogers from IBM is clearly in his element here. He's articulate, he's personable, he knows his stuff, and he is one with his audience - in this case a bunch of MVS 32 bit gunslingers. In this session he unabashedly described the goodies in the new releases of OS/390 that are just for systems programmers. We don't need no stinking "enterprise enablement". Give us buttons and dials and shortcuts and arcane goodies!

So Bob Rogers gives us... dynamic LPA! This is a nice facility, and one which third parties have provided for years and years. Now IBM lets you add individual modules to the LPA, you can delete and replace them too. And while Bob observed that Omegamon has been doing this for well over 20 years, he pointed out that IBM is providing an API. Maybe Omega will use the API instead of their own code, he mused, but preserve the operator command syntax that most people know.

OS/390 release 2.4 introduces WLM batch initiators. These are initiators under control of the Workload Manager, and are unknown to JES2. If the Workload Manager thinks you need another initiator for a particular job class, it will start one up automatically. You can migrate from JES2 initiators to WLM initiators on a class by class basis. I like this whole idea a lot, and can't wait to get my hands on this.

He warned us to watch out for velocity definitions in release 2.4 - the velocity calculations include I/O delays, and this can cause some small grief in the migration between 1.3 and 2.4.

Here is something that is really cool. In release 2.4, the Workload Manager keeps track of something called "abstract resources". Abstract resources are things you make up, with arbitrary names, and which by themselves mean nothing to OS/390. There is new JCL that you can introduce in batch JCL that says that before the job can be scheduled, a certain abstract resource has to be available. Then, you can turn these abstract resources on and off via WLM operator commands.

So you can have a resource named "SECONDSHIFT", which you don't turn on until, say, 5:00pm each afternoon. When you turn on the "SECONDSHIFT" resource, any job in the system whose JCL specifies SECONDSHIFT will be scheduled for execution.

We could define an "IDMS" resource, or a "SALES" resource. This has all kinds of possibilities for dealing with problems associated with job classes.

OS/390 2.4 and beyond no longer require APPC for Unix Services. Wonderful news! This was a regrettable design decision from the very beginning.

There is a new dump facility, which is something like an SVC dump for applications. A continuing complaint from customers is that when an application ABENDs, the runtime system intercepts the failure, does some cleanup, does some more processing, and eventually takes a formatted dump and tells somebody about it. Unfortunately so much processing has taken place after the actual failure that it is hard to tell much of anything about it. So now you can take a dump at the point of failure, before all the runtime cleanup nonsense, and analyze it later via IPCS. I like it!