Re: Regulator support for smsc911x

On Wed, Feb 08, 2012 at 09:31:41AM +0100, Sascha Hauer wrote:

There is also option e), something I've been thinking about for a while.
Implement a list of resources which can be attached to a device. By
resources I mean regulators, clocks and pinmux for example. A device
would then just call a make_me_work(state) function which iterates over
this list and enables/disables all resources as necessary. This way we
could attach everything we need to a device without cluttering the
driver code like we do today.

That gets tricky where you have resources that are only needed some of
the time (for example, many of the CODECs I work with can happily have
some of the supplies disabled while they are operational - some systems
may never enable certain supplies) and there are fun interactions with
things like runtime PM and system suspend to consider (wake on LAN would
be one for an ethernet driver).  Once you start hitting low power states
and pursuing optimisations there you start to find that the driver needs
to make decisions about what's going on that can't easily be completely
removed from it.

I have been meaning to do something like that which devices can
request if they happen to have trivial or common usage patterns (of
which there's a few) so all they need to do is set flags but I'm really
not sure it's a good idea by default.  Gets fiddly with the device core
though.