Re: [PATCH 1/5] regulator: dt-bindings: Add regulator-boot-force-off property

[Paul Louvel]

On Wed Oct 21, 2026 at 7:01 PM CEST, Conor Dooley wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 12:27:42PM +0200, Paul Louvel wrote:
>> Introduce a new property to immediately disable the regulator at boot
>> time.
>> This property is useful when a consumer device may query the state of
>> the regulator at boot time, and want to disable it right away, without a
>> prior regulator_enable().
>> 
>> Signed-off-by: Paul Louvel <paul.louvel@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> ---
>>  Documentation/devicetree/bindings/regulator/regulator.yaml | 8 ++++++++
>>  1 file changed, 8 insertions(+)
>> 
>> diff --git a/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/regulator/regulator.yaml b/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/regulator/regulator.yaml
>> index 019aeb664cae..2da8f70d7e7a 100644
>> --- a/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/regulator/regulator.yaml
>> +++ b/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/regulator/regulator.yaml
>> @@ -41,6 +41,14 @@ properties:
>>      description: boolean, regulator should never be disabled
>>      type: boolean
>>  
>> +  regulator-boot-force-off:
>> +    description: a regulator may be enabled by default when the system powers up.
>> +      A consumer may query the regulator's state during boot and disable it if
>> +      it is already enabled, potentially resulting in an unbalanced disable
>> +      operation. This property ensures that the regulator is disabled at boot,
>> +      regardless of its previous state.
>
> To be honest, I'm not sure how the commentary about querying the state
> or being unbalanced is relevant to the description - that sounds like
> something specific to the linux regulator framework?

Yes it is. Maybe I miss something, does this binding is used outside linux ?

>
> In fact, I'm not sure why this is needed at all? Can't you just change
> the software so that it is okay to disable a regulator that has an
> explicit enable count of zero?
>

Do you mean by calling regulator_force_disable() instead ? I thinked about that
but I don't think this is ideal.
Or just patch the core to allow unbalanced disable downstream ?
My intent was to provide an upstream solution to the problem I described in the
cover letter.

>> +    type: boolean
>> +
>>    regulator-boot-on:
>>      description: bootloader/firmware enabled regulator.
>>        It's expected that this regulator was left on by the bootloader.
>> 
>> -- 
>> 2.56.0
>> 





-- 
Paul Louvel, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com