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Message-Id: <1253634632-8398-1-git-send-email-broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:50:32 -0700
From: Mark Brown <broonie@...nsource.wolfsonmicro.com>
To: Liam Girdwood <lrg@...mlogic.co.uk>
Cc: linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
Mark Brown <broonie@...nsource.wolfsonmicro.com>
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@...nsource.wolfsonmicro.com>
---
Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt | 33 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1 files changed, 33 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
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 0000000..f9b56b7
--- /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.
--
1.6.3.3
--
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