Preexisting ACPI Specifications

ACPI and the UEFI Forum

The UEFI Forum included the ACPI spec in its portfolio in October 2013 and will host future spec iterations, following the ACPI v5.0a release. With spec ownership under the UEFI Forum, a greater number of contributors can pilot additional ACPI expansions. Uniting ACPI with existing UEFI platform standards will also help synchronize interface definitions and foster increased participation of open-source developers, which is critical to bringing ACPI onto new classes of platforms and devices.

The UEFI Forum will lead future ACPI developments of platform-independent interfaces for hardware discovery, configuration and power management. To become a member of the UEFI Forum, please visit theΒ membership page. A UEFI Forum working group has been established to handle future ACPI developments. Learn more about the ACPI Specification Working Group (ASWG) by visiting the UEFI Working Groups page.

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About ACPI

The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) industry-standard was developed to enable OS-directed configuration, power and thermal management, and RAS features of mobile, desktop, and server platforms. TheΒ ACPI spec describes the structures and mechanisms necessary to design operating system-directed power management and make advanced configuration architectures possible. ACPI applies to all classes of computers and is the key element in Operating System-directed configuration and Power Management (OSPM).

The ACPI open standard for device configuration and power management by the OS was first released in December 1996. It was originally developed by Intel, Microsoft and Toshiba, and was later joined by HP and Phoenix. Over time, ACPI replaced a collection of power management BIOS code, Advanced Power Management (APM) application programming interfaces (APIs), PNPBIOS APIs, and Multiprocessor Specification (MPS). The specification enables new power management technologies to evolve independently in operating systems and hardware, while also ensuring that they continue to work together.

Latest version of the ACPI specification.

Previous versions of the ACPI specification:

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