[PATCH v2 1/2] regulator: Add coupled regulator

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 04:25:38PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:

quoted

quoted

  - When you come to consider it from an hardware point of view, the
    device usually have a single pin that powers it. It's the board
    designer that chose to route that pin to multiple regulators, so
    it's really the board that is wired that way, and putting that
    code in the consumer drivers would be an abstraction leak imho.

quoted

That's a good point. Perhaps the regulator core needs to be able to 
parse the list and return the single ptr to the virtual regulator.

Exactly, if we don't want to represent the combination directly.  For
most uses it's probably OK but I can see us in a situation where we
might want to do things like only use one of the regulators in low load
situations where we might want to attach properties to the merge of the
two regulators rather than just referencing them both.  I'm not sure
that's realistic though or that we wouldn't just be working that use
case out dynamically at runtime.

I'm ambivalent on which way is better, it does complicate the
implementation to support doing this as lists and while it makes the DT
more elegant I'm not clear that it's worth the effort especially when it
comes to constraint combining.  But perhaps the implementation turns out
to be simpler than I would anticiapte.

I guess a separate driver would make it easier to deal with cases like
the one you suggested (shutting down when the load is going to be
lower). I don't see how we could have a good DT representation of that
if we're going to use lists.

Anyway, I'm fine with both approaches, just let me know what you
prefer.

Thanks!
Maxime

-- 
Maxime Ripard, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com
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