LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ContainerCon NA 2015

ACPI 6, released in April 2015, is the first major revision of the ACPI specification developed under the UEFI Forum umbrella and including contributions from Linux community members. It introduces support for persistent memory, support for hierarchical lower-power idle states of CPUs, CPU clusters and the whole system, an extension allowing C-style expressions to be used in the ACPI Source Language and more. Overall, changes made by it are likely to affect Linux in significant ways.

I will describe the new specification process used to produce ACPI 6 and how the Linux community was involved in it. I will outline the implementation of the ACPI support in the Linux kernel and explain how the new specification revision is going to be addressed by it. I will also discuss a few most important changes with respect to the previous revisions of ACPI and their possible impact on Linux.