CBXP (Control Block EXPlorer)

A unified and standardized interface for extracting and formatting z/OS control block data.

Description

z/OS Control Blocks are in-memory data structures that describe and control countless process, operating system components, and subsystems. Control blocks are ubiquitous on z/OS, but not very straight forward to access and extract information from. The mission of CBXP (Control Block EXPlorer) is to make it easy to extract and format z/OS control block data using industry standard tools and methodologies. CBXP accomplishes this by implementing a C/C++ XPLINK ASCII interface for extracting control block data and post processing it into JSON. This makes it straight forward to integrate with industry standard programming languages and tools, which generally have well documented and understood foreign language interfaces for C/C++, and native and or third party JSON support that makes working with JSON data easy.

CBXP is the successor to the existing cbxplorer project. CBXP mainly improves upon this existing work by being implemented in C/C++ so that it is not limited to a specific programming language or tool. CBXP also focuses heavily on providing an interface that is simple and straight forward to use.

Getting Started

Minimum z/OS & Language Versions

Currently, CBXP is being developed on z/OS 3.2. We hope to eventually support all z/OS versions that are fully supported by IBM.

• z/OS Product Lifecycle

All versions of the IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python that are fully supported by IBM are supported by CBXP.

• IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python Product Lifecycle

Dependencies

• z/OS Language Environment Runtime Support: CBXP is compiled using the IBM Open XL C/C++ 2.2 compiler, which is still fairly new and requires z/OS Language Environment service updates for runtime support.
  • More information can be found in section 5.2.2.2 Operational Requisites on page 8 in the Program Directory for IBM Open XL C/C++ 2.2 for z/OS.

Interfaces

Currently, the following interfaces are provided for CBXP. Additional interfaces can be added in the future if there are use cases for them.

• Python Interface
• CLI Interface
• C/C++ Interface

Supported Control Blocks

Currently, CBXP only has support for extracting and formatting a handful of System-Level Control Blocks. See Supported Control Blocks for more details.

Help

• GitHub Discussions

Authors

• Leonard J. Carcaramo Jr: lcarcaramo@ibm.com
• Elijah Swift: elijah.swift@ibm.com
• Varun Chennamadhava: varunchennamadhava@gmail.com

Maintainers

• Leonard J. Carcaramo Jr: lcarcaramo@ibm.com
• Elijah Swift: elijah.swift@ibm.com
• Varun Chennamadhava: varunchennamadhava@gmail.com