Re: Regulator support for smsc911x

[Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>]

On Tue, Feb 07, 2012 at 07:39:14PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 07, 2012 at 05:25:48PM -0200, Fabio Estevam wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 9:11 AM, Mark Brown
> 
> > > There's also options c) set up the regulators for the board and d) don't
> > > enable the regulator API if the board doesn't use regulators.
> 
> > Option c would require that we change every single board.
> 
> Well, yes.
> 
> > The patch below does option d.
> 
> > What do you think?
> 
> Absolutely not.  Putting conditional code like this in drivers is nuts,
> you would have to do the same thing in every single driver which is not
> a useful use of anyone's time.  This is *clearly* a generic thing and
> should therefore be handled in generic code for the same reason we don't
> have driver specific platform data for actual usage of the API.
> 
> Really, anyone who wants this sort of thing should just enable dummy
> regulators - it's exactly what you're implementing.  I'm pretty sure
> your board does actually have power supplies for the chip, you've just
> not told software about them.

Yes, my board also has a supply for the smc911x, it's the same as used
for the CPU...

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.

Sascha

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