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authorMark Brown <broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com>2009-09-22 08:50:32 -0700
committerLiam Girdwood <lrg@slimlogic.co.uk>2009-09-22 22:16:53 +0100
commit63209a71e8e7727f52208d17bb7180cd392edcfb (patch)
tree66f39826fdde64d0d77555a98c744d171df1e4fc /Documentation/power
parent55c1d7c60d9b269551cd7cc31e6be8323e1d94ec (diff)
downloadlinux-63209a71e8e7727f52208d17bb7180cd392edcfb.tar.bz2
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>
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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.