Power Management under Windows CE [part 3/3]

Applications can also interact with the power manager to change the current power state of the system or to be notified on power state transitions.

Application System Interaction

Using the Power Manager, applications can request system power state using the SetSystemPowerState. This is true for the system but applications can also interact with drivers. Imagine that a device driver is powered off after being used, this for power consumption reason, when applications requires an access to this driver, the driver must be turned on again. Using SetPowerRequirement, applications can ask drivers through the Power Manager, to switch to a specific power state. Then using ReleasePowerRequirement, the power requirement will be release and the driver will switch back to his original power state.

Request power notification

Using message queue, applications can be notified of power transition occurring on the system. When system is entering suspend, this is transparent for applications, and the only way for applications to be notified of resuming from suspend is to register to this message queue using the RequestPowerNotification function. The messages read from the message queue provide information on the status of the system.

Modify the Power Manager

The source code of the power manager is provided with Windows Embedded CE and can be located in %_WINCEROOT% \PUBLIC\COMMON\OAK\DRIVERS\PM . This gives you a chance to adapt the behavior of the Power Manager to your requirements. Most of the time, you do not have to make any modification in the code; instead use the registry to change the default behavior.

In conclusion the power management is straightforward for Windows Embedded CE when the power requirement of your device is simple, but can start to be tricky when more complicated. In any case, the system can be fully customized through the registry or for advanced usage by modifying the behavior of the Power Manager by directly modifying the source code. Applications can be notified of power transition and act if required, but it can also interact with the system to change the power state of drivers or the system. On their side device drivers can implement power management to support 5 different levels, and optimize the power consumption of your device. The Power Manager is the only one on the system to manage the power, applications and drivers always have to send request to the Power Manager that will relay the requests to the correct system component according to his internal state machine.

-Nicolas