Re: [PATCH V4 1/6] dt-bindings: regulator: Add "regulator-min-dropout-voltage-microvolt"

From: Satya Priya Kakitapalli (Temp)
Date: Mon Jan 03 2022 - 09:37:57 EST


On 12/11/2021 2:41 AM, Mark Brown wrote:
On Wed, Dec 08, 2021 at 04:56:48PM -0800, David Collins wrote:
On 12/7/21 7:19 AM, Mark Brown wrote:
On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 08:36:11PM +0530, Satya Priya Kakitapalli (Temp) wrote:
that regulator. We absolutely can and do expect this to be board
independent, it's a function of the design of the regulator. Sharing
the input supply has no impact on this, the input voltage that the
regulator needs just get fed into the requiremnts on the supply voltage.
The PM8008 LDOs are low noise LDOs intended to supply noise sensitive
camera sensor hardware. They can maintain output regulation with a
fixed headroom voltage. However, in order to guarantee high PSRR, the
headroom voltage must be scaled according to the peak load expected from
the each LDO on a given board. Thus, we included support for a DT
property to specify the headroom per LDO to meet noise requirements
across boards.
Interesting... how much extra headroom are we talking about here? I'd
be unsurprised to see this usually just quoted as part of the standard
headroom requirement and this smells like the sort of thing that's going
to be frequently misused. If the gains are something worth writing home
about


I'd think we should consider if it's better to support this
dynamically at runtime based on load information and provide options for
configuring the peak load information through DT instead for static
configurations. That would fit in with the stuff we have for managing
modes on DCDCs (which isn't really deployed but is there) and the API we
have for allowing client drivers to indicate their load requirements at
runtime that fits in with that. That'd allow us to only boost the
headroom when it's really needed.

This means Dynamic headroom control feature needs to be implemented. I need to explore more on this and gather info from team, Could we merge the present driver with "static headroom" for now? I'll do a follow up series to implement this feature.