Matt
There are a couple of things I guess I don't understand about this process. In a normal situation, I have a hardware configuration that was loaded from an IOCDS at POR, and an IODF that matches it. Then I can activate a new IODF which is different from the currently loaded config, and everything changes. So if I can change the config on a running system by activating a different IODF, what's different about the IPL process? Why can't it just do whatever activate does to change the hardware configuration to match the IODF being loaded?
When you issue an activate, one of the things that happens is that z/OS does a comapare of the old (current) IODF with the new IODF to identify the changes, and I think that's what takes most of the time if you have a large IODF. What you suggest at IPL sort of makes sense, except that there is nothing to compare with i.e. it doesnt have the old IODF to read, so has no way to know what changes would happen. It needs to know each change so that it can check for offline status etc and then perform the change.
And what configuration am I really running with now? The one in the IOCDS, or the one in the active IODF?
well both ... your hw config is from the IOCDS, so things like chps, CUs, and devices numbers. And then zOS is reading it's config from the OS config definition in the IODF, device numbers/edt/console This is how it normally works, just that normally they would be both derived from the same IODF. If you havn't made any major changes to the chps/cus etc than you'll probably find that the HW config is very similar (obviously as no one has noticed ;-) )It's entirely possible that although you've updated the IODF since the IOCDS was created, none of the changes relate to the hw, and the therefore the HW config could be exactly the same, its just that some of the timestamps are out of sync.
The thing to remember is that the IODF contains two separate but overlaping sections of information. The HW detail which goes to create the IOCDS (and HSA for dynamic update), and the OS Config which z/OS uses to IPL. The common factor being the device number. z/OS doesnt touch any of the CPC/CSS/Partition/CHP/CU detail, and the IOCDS doesnt get any of the OSconfig - they both have lists of devices. At IPL time zOS builds a list of devices from the OSconfig and then queries the CPC one by one to see if there is a matching entry, if so this device can be used...
Regards Roy ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
