Solaris must support deep C-States on Intel post-Penryn followon processors.
Intel's post-Penryn x86 processors will support greater power-savings in idle.
These processors will have different support of processor components during
idle deep C-States.
Solaris relies on processor APIC. Work is required to save/restore the
hardware state of the processor APIC components during idle deep C-State.
Deep C-State development is part of the OpenSolaris Tesla project.
Please see: http://opensolaris.org/project/tesla
Evaluation:
Please see http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/tesla/Work/CPUPM/
Solaris will support the ACPI Fixed Hardware and System IO mechanisms
for placing processors into Deeper C-states.
Only processors with invariant TSC will be support with Deep C-state.
An Idle Power Processor Group has been added to the PG hierachy to make
the OS thread-scheduler aware of Idle power groups.