From 63209a71e8e7727f52208d17bb7180cd392edcfb Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Mark Brown <broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com> Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:50:32 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] regulator: Add some brief design documentation Provide some brief documentation of some of the design decisions that are made by the regulator API. Signed-off-by: Mark Brown <broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com> Signed-off-by: Liam Girdwood <lrg@slimlogic.co.uk> --- Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt | 33 ++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 33 insertions(+) create mode 100644 Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt diff --git a/Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt b/Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..f9b56b72b782 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +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. -- GitLab