Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt

   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.