Release notes for Model 204 version 8.0 (Beta)

THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION! These release notes list the enhancements and other changes contained in Model 204 version 8.0, which is still in development. Until the commercial release of the software, Rocket reserves the right to add to, remove, or change anything described herein.

Overview

These release notes contain installation and features information for the Rocket Model 204 version 8.0 release. Before beginning your installation, please read through this information about product installation and changes.

Janus product enhancements

TLS 1.3 support

Janus SSL ports now support TLS 1.3 (RFC 8446) for both client and server connections. TLS 1.3 provides improved security and performance over TLS 1.2, including a simplified handshake with fewer round trips, and the removal of legacy features such as renegotiation.

The following TLS 1.3 cipher suites are supported:

• TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
• TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384

Key exchange is performed using X25519 (Curve25519 Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman, per RFC 7748). Certificate authentication uses RSA-PSS signatures.

Key derivation uses the HKDF-based key schedule defined in RFC 8446, replacing the PRF-based approach of earlier TLS versions.

TLS 1.3 is enabled by default on ports that allow TLS 1.2. To restrict a port to earlier protocol versions, use the existing SSLVERSION parameter on the JANUS DEFINE command.

Imagine Transparency support

A new facility called Imagine Transparency is now available to allow files in an Imagine database to be accessed from Model 204 as if they were native files.

A new port type, IMAGINET, is now available. It allows Model 204 files to be stored on an Imagine server rather than in operating system files. A new parameter is now available on the ALLOCATE command to indicate that a file is to be accessed via the IMAGINET port rather than from operating system files.

Performance enhancements

Hardware-accelerated deflate/inflate compression

The SOUL compression functions (Deflate, Inflate, Gzip, Gunzip, Zip, and Unzip) now exploit the IBM z15 (and above) DFLTCC (Deflate Conversion Call) hardware instruction when available. This provides significant performance improvement for compression and decompression of longstrings without any application code changes.

Hardware acceleration is used automatically when the processor supports it. On processors without DFLTCC support, the existing software implementation continues to be used transparently.

The DFLTCC instruction handles both the deflate (compress) and inflate (expand) operations natively in hardware, including CRC-32 computation, providing throughput improvements that scale with data size.