Power Management

System PM module

The PM module in the hypervisor does three things:

• When all UOSes enter low power state, VM management will notify the SOS lifecycle service and trigger the SOS to enter a low-power state. SOS follows its own standard low-power state entry process and writes the ACPI control register to put SOS into low-power state. Hypervisor traps the ACPI control register writing and emulates SOS low-power state entry.
• Once SOS low-power emulation is done, Hypervisor handles its own low-power state transition
• Once system resumes from low-power mode, the hypervisor handles its own resume and emulates SOS resume too.

It is assumed that SOS does not trigger any power state transition until the VM manager of ACRN notifies it that all UOSes are inactive and SOS offlines all its virtual APs.

Figure 112 shows the SOS/Hypervisor low-power state transition process. SOS triggers power state transition by writing ACPI control register on its virtual BSP (which is pinned to the physical BSP). The hypervisor then does the following in sequence before it writes to the physical ACPI control register to trigger physical power state transition:

• Pauses SOS.
• Offlines all physical APs.
• Save the context of console, ioapic of SOS, I/O MMU, lapic of SOS, virtual BSP.
• Save the context of physical BSP.

When exiting from low-power mode, the hypervisor does similar steps in reverse order to restore contexts, start APs and resume SOS. SOS is responsible for starting its own virtual APs as well as UOSes.

Figure 112 SOS/Hypervisor low power state transition process