summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorFrederic Weisbecker2009-10-18 01:09:09 +0200
committerFrederic Weisbecker2009-10-18 01:12:33 +0200
commit0f8f86c7bdd1c954fbe153af437a0d91a6c5721a (patch)
tree94a8d419a470a4f9852ca397bb9bbe48db92ff5c /Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt
parentMerge branch 'linus' into tracing/hw-breakpoints (diff)
parentperf tools: Move dereference after NULL test (diff)
downloadkernel-qcow2-linux-0f8f86c7bdd1c954fbe153af437a0d91a6c5721a.tar.gz
kernel-qcow2-linux-0f8f86c7bdd1c954fbe153af437a0d91a6c5721a.tar.xz
kernel-qcow2-linux-0f8f86c7bdd1c954fbe153af437a0d91a6c5721a.zip
Merge commit 'perf/core' into perf/hw-breakpoint
Conflicts: kernel/Makefile kernel/trace/Makefile kernel/trace/trace.h samples/Makefile Merge reason: We need to be uptodate with the perf events development branch because we plan to rewrite the breakpoints API on top of perf events.
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt33
1 files changed, 33 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt b/Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..f9b56b72b782
--- /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.