Question & Answer
Question
You would like to use the Breaking Event Address Register (BEAR) to diagnose a program check in CICS Transaction Server for z/OS (CICS TS). You think the abend is caused by a wild branch. You need to know, what is the BEAR, and how can you use it to resolve the abend?
Answer
CICS TS provides the contents of the Breaking Event Address Register (BEAR). The BEAR is a hardware enhancement in z9-109 (z/Architecture mode). The BEAR is a 64-bit register that contains the address of the last instruction that caused a break in sequential instruction - the last successful branch address. It can be very useful in diagnosing wild-branch types of problems that typically result in 0C1 or 0C4 abends.
The minimum operating system level to take advantage of the BEAR is z/OS V1.7.
The minimum operating system level to take advantage of the BEAR is z/OS V1.7.
The hardware will store the current contents of the BEAR in the Prefixed Save Area (PSA), field FLCEBEA. When a program check occurs, the operating system copies the contents of the BEAR from the PSA into diagnostic work areas, Recovery Termination Manager 2 Work Area (RTM2WA) and System Diagnostic Work Area (SDWA). The fields containing the BEAR are RTM2BEA and SDWABEA.
When the Kernel domain is formatted in a CICS dump with the BEAR support, the BEAR data will be formatted in the Kernel error information with title 'Branch Event Address'.
When the Kernel domain is formatted in a CICS dump with the BEAR support, the BEAR data will be formatted in the Kernel error information with title 'Branch Event Address'.
To view the Kernel domain, enter IPCS command verbx dfhpdxxx 'ke' where xxx is the version and release of the CICS dump. For example, the value of xxx is 730 for CICS TS 5.6 and 740 for CICS TS 6.1.
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Product Synonym
CICS/TS CICS TS CICS Transaction Server
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Document Information
Modified date:
26 July 2022
UID
swg21270839