Intel® vPro™ Technology

  Section 7 of 13  

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

Alert Standard Format

The next improvement in remote management of computers was Alert Standard Format (ASF), which reduced the impact of manageability operations on the platform as a whole. In other words, instead of the whole computer having to be turned on (as with WoL) in order to perform a small routine operation, an additional auxiliary processor could be added, with the capability of operating even while the rest of the platform remained in an Sx state.

In parallel, a standard for manageability support in S0 and Sx states, known as ASF, was developed. The first version of this specification, 1.03, was released in June 2001, and the next major version, 2.0, was released in April 2003 [3]. While a discussion of the ASF specification is outside the scope of this article, it is important to mention a certain limitation of this standard, which is written into the specification itself (in version 2.0):

“After a change to the system’s hardware configuration, the OS-present environment is used to configure the ASF alert-sending device with information that is not known or easily determinable within the OS-absent environment, e.g., management console and local system TCP/IP addresses.”

Again, to remind the reader, this limitation was written with desktop computers in mind, which were client manageability’s main usage model until a few years ago. In fact, for mobile computers, the problem is much bigger than just a case of a change in hardware configuration. Additional usecases, which are more relevant to mobile computers, would soon come to light.

  Section 7 of 13  

Back to Top