There are a few small changes in IBM i 7.2 that you should be aware of. Some of these were mentioned in the announcement material, but it’s good to expand upon them.
- You may have already heard that the maximum number of jobs on a partition has been increased to 970,000 (double the prior limit of 485,000). Yes, there are IBM i clients with extremely large environments where the maximum number of jobs needed to be increased! The maximum number of jobs is controlled by the QMAXJOB system value and the default setting is 163,520. The maximum number of jobs includes active jobs, as well as jobs on a job queue and jobs that have ended but have spooled output. Usually when there are a lot of jobs on the system, it is due to jobs that have ended with spooled output; you may want to look at detaching spooled files rather than increasing the number of jobs on the system.
- The work management interfaces have been updated to support large pool sizes. With increasing sizes of main memory, it is necessary to support larger sizes for storage pools. A “unit of measure” parameter has been added the Create and Change Subsystem Description and Change Shared Pools commands. This allows you to specify whether the storage size is in kilobytes or megabytes. The default of course is *KB to preserve consistency, but *MB is now an option. FYI, IBM i 7.1 supported 8 TB of memory per partition and IBM i 7.2 supports up to 16 TB. You can find limits such as this documented in the Maximum capacities section in the Knowledge Center for the appropriate release.
- A small enhancement was made to the Display Log (DSPLOG) command. A new parameter, “Message identifier selection” (MSGIDSLT) was added to allow you to specify whether the specified message ID (MSGID) is included or omitted from the output. The default is to include the message IDs, but *OMIT allows you to filter out messages you do not want to see.
This blog post was edited to fix broken links on April 12, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.