A regulator is an electronic device that supplies power to other devices. Devices powered by regulators are called consumers. One said they consume power provided by regulators. Most regulators can enable and disable their output and some can also control their output voltage or current. The driver should expose those capabilities to consumers by means of specific functions and data structures, which we will discuss in this chapter.
The chip that physically provides regulators is called a Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC):
The Linux regulator framework has been designed to interface and control voltage and current regulators. It is divided into four separate interfaces, as follows:
- A regulator drivers interface for regulator PMIC drivers. The structure of this interface can be found in include/linux/regulator/driver.h.
- A consumer interface for device...