Advanced Configuration and Power Interface
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Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is an open standard that operating systems can use to discover and configure computer hardware components, to perform power management (e.g. putting unused hardware components to sleep), auto configuration (e.g. plug and play and hot swapping), and status monitoring. It was first released in December 1996. ACPI aims to replace Advanced Power Management (APM), the MultiProcessor Specification, and the Plug and Play BIOS (PnP) Specification. ACPI brings power management under the control of the operating system, as opposed to the previous BIOS-ce
Key facts
- Technology standard.title
- Advanced Configuration and Power Interface
- Technology standard.abbreviation
- ACPI
- Technology standard.status
- Published
- Technology standard.first_published
- December 1996
- Technology standard.version
- 6.6
- Technology standard.version_date
- May 2025
- Technology standard.related_standards
- UEFI
- Technology standard.domain
- Power management firmware
via Wikipedia infobox
~15 min read
Encyclopedic overview
18 sectionsContents
- Architecture <span class="anchor" id="AML"></span><span class="anchor" id="ASL"></span>
- ACPI Component Architecture (ACPICA) <span class="anchor" id="ACPICA"></span>
- History <span class="anchor" id="1.0"></span><span class="anchor" id="1.0a"></span><span class="anchor" id="1.0b"></span><span class="anchor" id="2.0"></span><span class="anchor" id="2.0a"></span><span class="anchor" id="2.0b"></span><span class="anchor" id="2.0c"></span>
- Operating systems
- OSPM responsibilities
- Power states <span class="anchor" id="S0"></span><span class="anchor" id="S1"></span><span class="anchor" id="S2"></span><span class="anchor" id="S3"></span><span class="anchor" id="S4"></span><span class="anchor" id="S5"></span><span class="anchor" id="POWER-STATES"></span>
- Global states <span class="anchor" id="G0"></span><span class="anchor" id="G1"></span><span class="anchor" id="G2"></span><span class="anchor" id="G3"></span><span class="anchor" id="G4"></span><span class="anchor" id="GSTATES"></span>
- Device states
- Processor states <span class="anchor" id="CPU-states"></span><span class="anchor" id="CPU-STATES"></span><span class="anchor" id="POWER-STATES"></span>
- Performance state <span class="anchor" id="P-state"></span>
- Interfaces
- Hardware
- Firmware <span class="anchor" id="DSDT"></span><span class="anchor" id="SSDT"></span><span class="anchor" id="SRAT"></span>
- Criticism
- See also
- Further reading
- References
- External links
Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is an open standard that operating systems can use to discover and configure computer hardware components, to perform power management (e.g. putting unused hardware components to sleep), auto configuration (e.g. plug and play and hot swapping), and status monitoring. It was first released in December 1996. ACPI aims to replace Advanced Power Management (APM), the MultiProcessor Specification, and the Plug and Play BIOS (PnP) Specification. ACPI brings power management under the control of the operating system, as opposed to the previous BIOS-centric system that relied on platform-specific firmware to determine power management and configuration policies. The specification is central to the Operating System-directed configuration and Power Management (OSPM) system. ACPI defines hardware abstraction interfaces between the device's firmware (e.g. BIOS, UEFI), the computer hardware components, and the operating systems.
Internally, ACPI advertises the available components and their functions to the operating system kernel using instruction lists ("methods") provided through the system firmware (UEFI or BIOS), which the kernel parses. ACPI then executes the desired operations written in ACPI Machine Language (such as the initialization of hardware components) using an embedded minimal virtual machine.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Advanced Configuration and Power Interface” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.