Patent ID: 8140713

Claim:
A computer program product for facilitating input/output processing of a processing environment, the computer program product comprising: a tangible non-transitory storage medium readable by a processing circuit and storing instructions for execution by the processing circuit for performing a method comprising: obtaining by an input/output communications adapter of the processing environment a transport control word, the transport control word including a count of the total amount of data being transferred, an address of a channel command word descriptor to be sent to a control unit of the processing environment, in which the channel command word descriptor is configured to contain a plurality of commands to be executed by the control unit, an address that informs the input/output communications adapter where to store or fetch data received from or transmitted to the control unit, and an address of a location to store ending status received from the control unit; forwarding from the input/output communications adapter to the control unit the channel command word descriptor that includes one or more commands as one entity, wherein the forwarding includes forwarding from the input/output communications adapter to the control unit the channel command word descriptor including the one or more commands in a single communication; and receiving the ending status by the input/output communications adapter absent a tracking of state of individual commands by the input/output communications adapter, the ending status comprising timing information associated with the one or more commands.