Re: [PATCH 0/6] regulator: core: Add support for external outputs

[Zev Weiss <zev@bewilderbeest.net>]

On Wed, May 04, 2022 at 05:56:13AM PDT, Mark Brown wrote:
>On Tue, May 03, 2022 at 11:50:35PM -0700, Zev Weiss wrote:
>
>> The DT bindings changes (patches 1 and 2) consist of a boolean
>> regulator property to mark it as supplying an external output, and a
>> reg-external-output binding to act as a downstream device representing
>> that output.  The redundancy between the two maybe isn't entirely
>> ideal, but it was the cleanest approach I've been able to come up with
>> so far in terms of working with the regulator subsystem; I'm certainly
>> open to suggestions for better ways of going about this.
>
>Nothing in the series articulates what the purpose of the redundancy is
>- your description of this is a consumer, why would the regulator itself
>care what's connected to it?

Hi Mark, thanks for the review.

To some extent that was an additional (maybe excessive) protective 
measure against regulators ending up userspace-controllable when they 
shouldn't be, since I had previously gotten the impression that there 
was some concern about that possibility.

More functionally though, it was also basically a hack to allow the 
'state' sysfs attribute's mode to get set properly in 
regulator_register(), before the consumer is known.  Though if things 
are rearranged based on what you said in another message about putting 
the enable/disable control in a consumer driver instead of the regulator 
itself, it should be easy to get rid of.


Thanks,
Zev