1========================== 2Regulator API design notes 3========================== 4 5This document provides a brief, partially structured, overview of some 6of the design considerations which impact the regulator API design. 7 8Safety 9------ 10 11 - Errors in regulator configuration can have very serious consequences 12 for the system, potentially including lasting hardware damage. 13 - It is not possible to automatically determine the power configuration 14 of the system - software-equivalent variants of the same chip may 15 have different power requirements, and not all components with power 16 requirements are visible to software. 17 18.. note:: 19 20 The API should make no changes to the hardware state unless it has 21 specific knowledge that these changes are safe to perform on this 22 particular system. 23 24Consumer use cases 25------------------ 26 27 - The overwhelming majority of devices in a system will have no 28 requirement to do any runtime configuration of their power beyond 29 being able to turn it on or off. 30 31 - Many of the power supplies in the system will be shared between many 32 different consumers. 33 34.. note:: 35 36 The consumer API should be structured so that these use cases are 37 very easy to handle and so that consumers will work with shared 38 supplies without any additional effort. 39