System and method for using an operating system defined field in ACPI support multiple operating systems

摘要

A system and method for supporting multiple operating systems with mutually exclusive requirements on a single computer system, or platform. The operating system sets an ACPI variable to identify the operating system running on the platform. The system firmware automatically comes up with a common set of functionality to satisfy all operating systems that can run on the platform. The ACPI interpreter reads the OS identifying variable upon boot-up and uses it in conditional code that depends on the operating system to fully define the operation of the system component.