diff --git a/Documentation/pinctrl.txt b/Documentation/pinctrl.txt
index eb46b1c..4431c3e7 100644
--- a/Documentation/pinctrl.txt
+++ b/Documentation/pinctrl.txt
@@ -1043,6 +1043,11 @@
 The pins are allocated for your device when you issue the pinctrl_get() call,
 after this you should be able to see this in the debugfs listing of all pins.
 
+NOTE: the pinctrl system will return -EPROBE_DEFER if it cannot find the
+requested pinctrl handles, for example if the pinctrl driver has not yet
+registered. Thus make sure that the error path in your driver gracefully
+cleans up and is ready to retry the probing later in the startup process.
+
 
 System pin control hogging
 ==========================