Devicetree information

ARM kernel maintainers decided that the best way to configure SoC hardware, would be to create a separate description of a particular SoC into something called a device tree file, in order to keep it out of the kernel.

In Linux there is a concept of "device trees", which is quite separate from the "/dev" structure & udev. It's available in PC land, although it isn't strictly necessary necessary because of the BIOS. Cursory googling suggests that the device tree is used in EFI (or UEFI?) based boot sequences, which is a kind of modern bootloading alternative to the BIOS.

A "device tree" is a data structure that is given at boot-time, probably by the 2nd stage bootloader, to the final stage kernel so that it load the right drivers (ie kernel modules) with the right parameters. It's a platform description that iis useful for describing the parameters of standard subcomponents like PCI buses, Brand X ethernet chips, etc. In

In ARM land there has never been anything like the BIOS, which was tailored to specific hardware (especially motherboards or laptops) but had quite a universal interface across plaforms.. The BIOS was thus able to help the kernel identify the hardware arrangment of the platform. Because ARM has not history of a standard firmware bootloading stage to describe hardware, as PCs have (or had) BIOS, device trees (along with kexecboot or u-boot or barebox etc) are a more essential consideration for arm. A booting ARM core doesn't even know about other cores in the same multi-core CPU. A "device tree" a document (source or compiled bytecode) that can be passed to the kernel at boot that describes the hardware layout of the entire system.

  • dts: Source file specification of a device tree for a platform.

  • dtb: Compiled bytecode representing the device tree, sometimes called a Flattened Devicee Tree (FDT).

  • dtc: The bytecode compiler that turns dts files into dtb file

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