linux/Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt

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Regulator API design notes
==========================
This document provides a brief, partially structured, overview of some
of the design considerations which impact the regulator API design.
Safety
------
- Errors in regulator configuration can have very serious consequences
for the system, potentially including lasting hardware damage.
- It is not possible to automatically determine the power confugration
of the system - software-equivalent variants of the same chip may
have different power requirments, and not all components with power
requirements are visible to software.
=> The API should make no changes to the hardware state unless it has
specific knowledge that these changes are safe to do perform on
this particular system.
Consumer use cases
------------------
- The overwhelming majority of devices in a system will have no
requirement to do any runtime configuration of their power beyond
being able to turn it on or off.
- Many of the power supplies in the system will be shared between many
different consumers.
=> The consumer API should be structured so that these use cases are
very easy to handle and so that consumers will work with shared
supplies without any additional effort.