Power-saving operating system for virtual environment

摘要

Principles for enabling power management techniques for virtual machines. In a virtual machine environment, a physical computer system may maintain management facilities to direct and control one or more virtual machines executing thereon. In some techniques described herein, the management facilities may be adapted to place a virtual processor in an idle state in response to commands from a guest operating system. One or more signaling mechanisms may be supported such that the guest operating system will command the management facilities to place virtual processors in the idle state.

主权项

1. A method performed on at least one computing device, the method comprising:
intercepting, by a management facility, a query from an operating system of a virtual machine, the query seeking an indication that at least one virtual processor executing the operating system of the virtual machine supports an Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (“ACPI”) idle state, where the ACPI idle state comprises a C1 idle state or a C2 idle state; and informing, in response to the intercepting, the operating system of the virtual machine that the at least one virtual processor supports the ACPI idle state even if a physical processor of the at least one computing device that is executing the virtual machine does not support the ACPI idle state.