Have a look at the specification of ACPI which should be supported in your Bios. Below is a summary of the features incorporated into the ACPI specification in different versions. OpenSolaris does support ACPI correctly as do many other OS. As you can see the ACPI v4.0 specification supports Power Metering which is great news providing your BIOS supports ACPI v4.0. I wanted to monitor CPU and motherboard temperature which is part of the ACPI v3.0 specification which has been around since 2004. When configuring my Motherboard BIOS I selected ACPI v3.0 support so I thought it would be straight forward to access the Thermal Zone information without resorting to custom tools. However no thermal zone information, thought I had a bug and contacted one of the Sun engineers who had posted on one of the forums. After running a pre-compiled binary to dump the ACPI information from my computer I found that the motherboard manufacturer did not fully support the ACPI v3.0 specification. False advertising? After contacting the manufacturer still no fully supported ACPI v3.0 specification.
ACPI Revision and Change Description (see http://www.acpi.info) 4.0 June 2009 Major specification revision. Clock Domains, x2APIC Support, Logical Processor Idling, Corrected Platform Error Polling Table, Maximum System Characteristics Table, Power Metering and Budgeting, IPMI Operation Region, USB3 Support in _PLD, Re-evaluation of _PPC acknowledgement via _OST, Thermal Model Enhancements, _OSC at \_SB, Wake Alarm Device, Battery Related Extensions, Memory Bandwidth Monitoring and Reporting, ACPI Hardware Error Interfaces, D3hot. 3.0b Oct. 2006 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. 3.0a Dec. 2005 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. 3.0 Sept. 2004 Major specification revision. General configuration enhancements. Inter-Processor power, performance, and throttling state dependency support added. Support for > 256 processors added. NUMA Distancing support added. PCI Express support added. SATA support added. Ambient Light Sensor and User Presence device support added. Thermal model extended beyond processor-centric support. 2.0c Aug.. 2003 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. 2.0b Oct. 2002 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. 2.0a Mar. 2002 Errata corrected and clarifications added. ACPI 2.0 Errata Document Revision 1.0 through 1.5 integrated. ACPI 2.0 Errata Doc. Rev. 1.5 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. ACPI 2.0 Errata Doc. Rev. 1.4 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. ACPI 2.0 Errata Doc. Rev. 1.3 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. ACPI 2.0 Errata Doc. Rev. 1.2 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. ACPI 2.0 Errata Doc. Rev. 1.1 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. ACPI 2.0 Errata Doc. Rev. 1.0 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. 2.0 Aug. 2000 Major specification revision. 64-bit addressing support added. Processor and device performance state support added. Numerous multiprocessor workstation and server-related enhancements. Consistency and readability enhancements throughout. 1.0b Feb. 1999 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. New interfaces added. 1.0a Jul. 1998 - Errata corrected and clarifications added. New interfaces added. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
