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diff --git a/Documentation/power/regulator/design.rst b/Documentation/power/regulator/design.rst new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3b09c6841 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/power/regulator/design.rst @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +========================== +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. + +.. note:: + + 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. + +.. note:: + + 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. |