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regulator: Add some brief design documentation
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Provide some brief documentation of some of the design decisions that
are made by the regulator API.

Signed-off-by: Mark Brown <broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com>
Signed-off-by: Liam Girdwood <lrg@slimlogic.co.uk>
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Mark Brown authored and Liam Girdwood committed Sep 22, 2009
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33 changes: 33 additions & 0 deletions Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt
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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.

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