Re: [PATCH 0/7] Implement generic regulator constraints parsing for ACPI and OF

[Dmitry Torokhov]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 06:29:55PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 06:23:20PM +0000, Mark Rutland wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 08:56:42AM -0800, Furquan Shaikh wrote:
> 
> > > That is the reason why the recent change to add ACPI support to fixed
> > > regulators was done
> > > (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/regulator/fixed.c#L100).
> 
> > To be honest, I'm surprised this got merged.
> 
> My understanding was that it was instantiated from another device as an
> implementation detail of that device, letting it say "this GPIO should
> be handled as a regulator".
> 
> > Mark, this was added in this cycle; can we please rip that out for now?
> 
> If it's instantiated directly we probably should.
> 
> > We can certainly come up with something that allows drivers to support
> > both, but trying to do this without updating drivers opens a huge set of
> > problems.
> 
> I think there's a reasonable chance that any ACPI specs could be written
> in such a way as to allow transparent support in Linux, the main thing
> I'd worry about is naming issues.

So if I am reading this correctly, currently ACPI does not expose power
supplies directly, but rather ties them to the device power state (D0,
D3cold, etc). Linux drivers do not usually follow that state model and
expect to have all their power supplies be given to them and then
figures out what to do with them itself. Given that, what do we do? Do
we map only entries from _PR3 so they are available to drivers via
regulator_get()? Or we ask the standard to add method enumerating all
supplies?

Thanks.

-- 
Dmitry