Based on kernel version 4.16.1. Page generated on 2018-04-09 11:53 EST.
1 Regulator API design notes 2 ========================== 3 4 This document provides a brief, partially structured, overview of some 5 of the design considerations which impact the regulator API design. 6 7 Safety 8 ------ 9 10 - Errors in regulator configuration can have very serious consequences 11 for the system, potentially including lasting hardware damage. 12 - It is not possible to automatically determine the power configuration 13 of the system - software-equivalent variants of the same chip may 14 have different power requirements, and not all components with power 15 requirements are visible to software. 16 17 => The API should make no changes to the hardware state unless it has 18 specific knowledge that these changes are safe to perform on this 19 particular system. 20 21 Consumer use cases 22 ------------------ 23 24 - The overwhelming majority of devices in a system will have no 25 requirement to do any runtime configuration of their power beyond 26 being able to turn it on or off. 27 28 - Many of the power supplies in the system will be shared between many 29 different consumers. 30 31 => The consumer API should be structured so that these use cases are 32 very easy to handle and so that consumers will work with shared 33 supplies without any additional effort.