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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 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.
- => 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.
- => 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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