What is the advanced configuration and power interface?
Advanced configurations and power interfaces are standard for computer management. Also known as ACPI, it brings many aspects of the device configuration under the operating system control (OS). Most older energy management is implemented in OS with ACPI location in the basic input output system (BIOS). ACPI is used in computer systems to manage the discovery of devices as well as configuration of power and thermal monitoring. End users often use ACPI to determine how long devices such as hard drives should fit before lowering their energy consumption. Its aim was to consolidate the system management in one place for servers and portable and desktop computers. Before ACPI, many of these functions were performed using BIOS specific to the motherboard. Other specifications called Advanced Power Management (APM) Provivacing part of the application interface together with the BIOS. Multiprocessor specification tables also played a crucial role and were also integrated into ACPI.
Specifications for advanced configurations and power interfaces have evolved during 2000. Support for new devices and technologies while maintaining most of the OS management and configuration functions. System BIOS and firmware communicate with ACPI through the ACPI Machine Language (AML) hardware and language tables. This allows the administrative code independent of the ACPI platform to access devices specific to the platform on each computer. The ACPI Standard also defines the hardware function interface to reduce the amount of code required to restore and fail.
AML interpreter implementation requirement in each OS helped to slow down the ACPI standard. Advanced Confv in 1998 was created architecture of Iguration and Power Interface Component Architecture (ACPICA) to help developers OS. It includes AML interpreter independent of OS along with some of the required ACPI infrastructure. ACPICA is designed to allow any OS to use ACPI rather than being specific to the OS. It is a standard with an open source code that has evolved over time along with ACPI specification.
Power management based on advanced configuration and power interface is a key part of green computer technology. Standards, such as ACPI, allow OS to insert processors and components of the motherboard into different levels of "sleep" as needed. For example, the Wake-on-LAN network interface can minimize its energy consumption until traffic has been detected. The whole system can be powered except for its main memory, waiting for a specific keyboard operation. Some green motherboard also have the entire processor designed for system management.