The benefits to using the ACPI standard include enhanced power management functionality and a robust interface for configuring motherboard devices. ACPI offers stability and backward-compatibility for legacy operating systems running on new hardware, without requiring major re-writes or re-builds of the software stack. This provides an open application platform that sits on top of standard compliant firmware. The hardware-discovery and hard-control, separated by the ACPI abstraction layer, allows OSes to condense test-case scenarios to a single image test. This reduces engineering expenses, as the AML (ACPI Machine Language) encoding embedded within the ACPI tables removes the need for the kernel image to contain individual drivers.