Facilitating processing within computing environments supporting pageable guests

摘要

Processing within a computing environment that supports pageable guests is facilitated. Processing is facilitated in many ways, including, but not limited to, associating guest and host state information with guest blocks of storage; maintaining the state information in control blocks in host memory; enabling the changing of states; and using the state information in management decisions. In one particular example, the guest state includes an indication of usefulness and importance of memory contents to the guest, and the host state reflects the ease of access to memory contents. The host and guest state information is used in managing memory of the host and/or guests.

主权项

1. A computer system for executing a machine instruction in a computing environment, the computer system comprising:
a memory; and a processor in communications with the memory, wherein the computer system is configured to perform a method, said method comprising:
obtaining a machine instruction for execution, the machine instruction being defined for computer execution according to a computer architecture, the machine instruction comprising:
an operation code to specify an Extract and Set Storage Attributes operation;a field indicating an operation to be performed, the operation comprising at least one of an extract operation and a set operation; anda first register field to designate a first register; andexecuting the machine instruction, the executing comprising:
based on the operation comprising an extract operation or a set operation, extracting into the first register, absent host involvement, one or more of guest state information of a block of memory assigned to a guest of the computing environment and host state information relating to the block of memory, the guest state information providing a state of the block of memory as it relates to the guest and indicating a particular meaning contents of the block of memory have to the guest.