design.rst 1.3 KB

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  1. ==========================
  2. Regulator API design notes
  3. ==========================
  4. This document provides a brief, partially structured, overview of some
  5. of the design considerations which impact the regulator API design.
  6. Safety
  7. ------
  8. - Errors in regulator configuration can have very serious consequences
  9. for the system, potentially including lasting hardware damage.
  10. - It is not possible to automatically determine the power configuration
  11. of the system - software-equivalent variants of the same chip may
  12. have different power requirements, and not all components with power
  13. requirements are visible to software.
  14. .. note::
  15. The API should make no changes to the hardware state unless it has
  16. specific knowledge that these changes are safe to perform on this
  17. particular system.
  18. Consumer use cases
  19. ------------------
  20. - The overwhelming majority of devices in a system will have no
  21. requirement to do any runtime configuration of their power beyond
  22. being able to turn it on or off.
  23. - Many of the power supplies in the system will be shared between many
  24. different consumers.
  25. .. note::
  26. The consumer API should be structured so that these use cases are
  27. very easy to handle and so that consumers will work with shared
  28. supplies without any additional effort.