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authorIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>2009-10-01 11:20:33 +0200
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>2009-10-01 11:20:48 +0200
commit0aa73ba1c4e1ad1d51a29e0df95ccd9f746918b6 (patch)
treef0714ddcd02812b4fbe3b5405df9e4068f5587e2 /Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt
parent925936ebf35a95c290e010b784c962164e6728f3 (diff)
parent33974093c024f08caadd2fc71a83bd811ed1831d (diff)
Merge branch 'tracing/urgent' into tracing/core
Merge reason: Pick up latest fixes and update to latest upstream. Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
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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.