Supervisor Call instruction

A Supervisor Call instruction (SVC) is a hardware instruction used by the System/360 family of IBM mainframe computers up to contemporary zSeries, the Amdahl 470V/5, 470V/6, 470V/7, 470V/8, 580, 5880, 5990M, and 5990A, and others; Univac 90/60, 90/70 and 90/80, and possibly others; the Fujitsu M180 (UP) and M200 (MP), and others; and is also used in the Hercules open source mainframe emulation software. It causes an interrupt to request a service from the operating system. The system routine providing the service is called an SVC routine. SVC is a system call.

This article covers the specific instruction on the IBM System/360 and successor mainframe computers, and compatible machines. For the general concept of an instruction for issuing calls to an operating system, see System call.