Patent ID: 8417837

Claim:
A computer program product for executing a machine instruction in a central processing unit, the computer program product comprising: a non-transitory computer readable storage medium readable by a processing circuit and storing instructions for execution by the processing circuit for performing a 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 opcode field identifying a set sampling controls instruction; and a first field identifying a general register, the contents of which are added to the contents of a second field to form a second operand address; and executing the machine instruction, the executing comprising: activating sampling for one or more sampling intervals to obtain information relating to processing of the central processing unit, wherein the activating sampling comprises at least one of activating basic sampling to obtain a set of architected sample data or activating diagnostic sampling to obtain a set of non-architected sample data; and placing in one or more control registers one or more sampling controls of a request block located in one or more storage locations designated by the second operand address.