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