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 configuration
of the system - software-equivalent variants of the same chip may
have different power requirements, 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 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.
