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

[Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>]

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On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 07:11:51PM +0200, Paul Louvel wrote:
> 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:

> >> +  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?

I'm fairly sure this is about masking some driver bug, a driver should
never be disabling something it didn't enable.

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

Pretty sure u-boot uses it.

> > 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.

No, you should only be using that API for recovering from catastrophic
hardware errors where you're cutting power to do something like
preventing physical damange to the system and serious disruption to
other users is an acceptable cost.

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