Intel® vPro™ Technology

  Section 5 of 13  

Mobile Manageability in Low-Power and Operating-System-Absent States

The History of Manageability

The ACPI standard[1] defines various power states of computers. These are termed “S-States.”

For the purposes of manageability, at first there was only the S0 state. In other words, a computer could only be managed remotely when it was in an S0 state. In the ACPI S3 (sleep), S4 (hibernate), and S5 (off) states—known collectively as Sx states—there was no support for manageability. As such, all that was required on the managed computer was software running on the main CPU, either on top of the computer’s OS or as a part of its BIOS, which was able to respond to remote requests.

Over time, it became very clear that what was needed was the capability of managing a computer remotely when it was in a state other than S0, especially since computers spend a significant amount of their time in states other than S0, that is, in Sx power states.

  Section 5 of 13