Kernel-3.10.0-957.el7_design

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.