What does OMVS look like from a traditional OS/390 View?

The OMVS kernel is a started task OMVS. Among other things, all HFS file accesses are performed through the OMVS kernel. See ACF2 Security for OMVS for more information.

OMVS processes run on special initiators - the started task name appears as BPXAS. When the workload is active, the job name is

the userid when the process is not launched from a batch job, started task or TSO session. An example is an FTP connection.
the job name when launched from a TSO user, batch job or started task. If the job name is 7 characters or less in length, then a numeric sequence number 0-9 is appended to the job name.
An non-OMVS job, such as a batch job or TSO session, can be "dubbed", which allows OMVS work to run within that address space. See OpenEdition Environment Variables for more information.

If you display an OMVS job using the D A console command, you will see an O in the status field. For example, FTPD1 STEP1 FTPD OWT AO The A status indicates that this job is an attached transaction program running on a BPXAS initiator.

See OMVS Resource Limits for information about how tradition OS/390 limits such as CPU time and REGION are handled. See the main OMVS page here for more links to more information about OMVS.

OS/390 Information about OMVS work

The shell command ps -o jobname,pid,ppid,state,user,stime,xasid,args=CMD -e displays the jobname and asid (in hexadecimal) as well as the typical process information. The "-e" option says to display information about all accessible process (ones for which you are allowed to retrieve information).

See Spooling output from OMVS processes for information about how OMVS work interacts with JES2. See OMVS Accounting for information about the use of accounting fields with OMVS work.