Author: User:Monster4711

Photo: wikimedia.org
Device Tree:
Past, Present, Future
Neil Armstrong - BayLibre

1
Quick bio
Embedded Linux Engineer since 2008
First Embedded Linux Conference Europe in 2009
Linux Device Tree adopter since 2012
BayLibre Kernel Hacker since 2015
Linux & U-Boot Maintainer since 2017

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Device Tree: Past

Where does it comes from ?

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Device Tree: Past
Software Engineers always struggled to describe in a
simple and portable way the different hardwares.

● In code ?
● In binary format ?
● In text format ?
● Auto generated ?

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Classic System Architecture

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Classic x86 System Architecture

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Modern System Architecture

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System-On-Chip Architecture

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Device Tree : Past
● Multiple different solutions were found :
○ ACPI table in the x86 world
○ Device Tree in the SPARC/PowerPC world
● Both solutions describes the hardware in a generic way
that can be parsed and understood by the Operating
System
● ACPI was designed to be very Intel/Microsoft specific,
even if it was used on various architectures with
Windows NT
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Device Tree : Past
● ACPI is a very complex hardware description, aimed to
keep a tight control on the PC architecture & market
○ “Hardware Enumeration” in DSDT ACPI table
○ More than description, defines how to configure and
manage HW power states
● Device Tree was designed to be written/understood by
humans then processed to be understood by software

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Device Tree : Specifications
● IEEE-1275 formalized specification (1994)
○ The set of devices attached to the system, including
permanently installed devices and plug-in devices, is
described by an Open Firmware data structure known as
the device tree. The operating system may inspect the
device tree to determine the hardware configuration of the
system. Each device in the device tree is described by a
property list. The set of properties describing a device is
arbitrarily extensible so that any type of device and any kind
of information that needs to be reported about the device
can be accommodated.
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Device Tree : Specifications
● PowerPC™ Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP)
specifies DT (1995)
○ Developed by Apple, IBM and Motorola
○ Extends IEEE-1275 to PowerPC™
● ePAPR specifies DT (2008)
○ Stands for Power.org™ Standard for Embedded Power
Architecture™ Platform Requirements
○ “The ePAPR is loosely related to the IEEE 1275”
○ “Because of the nature of embedded systems, some of
these problems faced by open, general purpose computers
do not apply”
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Device Tree : History
Multiple implementation existed with different formats but the same goal :
● Sun Microsystems - Open Boot / Open Firmware (1988)
○ Used in SPARC systems
○ Uses Device Tree to describe hardware
● Apple adopts Open Firmware on Power Mac 7200 (1995) using DT
along IBM
○ Uses Open Firmware and DT until Macs switched to Intel CPUs
○ Still uses a DT form in iPhone/iPad/iPod ARM Based devices
○ PCI devices represented in DT, generated by firmware

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Device Tree : History
● 2005 : Linux PowerPC support starts switching to Device tree
● 2006 : First device tree in Linux codebase “mpc8641_hpcn.dts”
● 2007 :
○ Initial Sony PS3 support with basic DTS
○ Common Device Tree implementation for Sparc and
PowerPC in “drivers/of”
● 2009 : microblaze switched to Device Tree
● 2011 : ARM switched to Device Tree
● 2014 : Device Tree used by 12 over 28 architecture

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A little bit of ELC history
● Almost 10 years go (October 15 & 16, 2009),
Embedded Linux Conference Europe was located in Grenoble
(91,65 km from here, 56.94 miles)

● Device Tree for ARM was heavily discussed in 2009 & 2010
● Vitaly Wool and Wolfram Sang did great talks on the topic in 2009
○ https://elinux.org/ELC_Europe_2009_Presentations
○ Wolfram shared his experience on I2C, UIO and GPIO for Device
Tree at the time
○ Vitaly summed-up the heated discussions about Device Tree
Spoiler Alert: the “Pro DT” did win the debate

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A little bit of ELC history
Thanks Vitaly for
providing the .odp of
the slides, still
perfectly opening
10y after !

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Device Tree : History

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Device Tree : History

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Device Tree : History

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 Device Tree : History
Arch Boards
arch/arm 1176
arch/arm64 262
arch/powerpc 200
arch/mips 51
arch/arc 17
arch/xtensa 7
arch/c6x 5
arch/h8300 3
arch/nios2 2
arch/openrisc 2
arch/microblaze 1
arch/nds32 1
arch/riscv 1
arch/sh 1

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Device Tree: Present

How and where is it used ?

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 Device Tree : Specifications
http://devicetree.org
● A new initiative appeared to facilitate the future evolution of the
Device Tree Standard.
○ Established by ARM, IBM and NXP
○ Sponsored by ARM, Hisilicon, ST and Linaro
○ Continuation of the ePAPR specifications
○ Adapted to current and future hardware
● v0.2 has been tagged on 20th December 2017
● Community Work is done around a github and a mailing-list

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Device Tree: Basics
● Will cover only basics
● You can find extended Device Tree informations in the following :
○ “Engaging Device Trees” Geert Uytterhoeven
○ “Device Tree for Dummies” Thomas Petazzoni
○ “Contemporary Device Tree” Matt Porter
○ “Device Tree The Disaster so Far” Mark Rutland
○ NXP AN5125 “Introduction to Device Trees”
○ https://www.devicetree.org/specifications/
○ Power.org™ Standard for Embedded Power Architecture™
Platform Requirements (ePAPR)

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Device Tree: Source Format
● You will find up to 828334 lines of Device Tree source in current Linux Tree
● “Device Tree Compiler” aka DTC can “compile” the source format into :
○ Source Format
○ Device Tree Blob : What will be used by U-Boot/Linux
○ Blob in Assembly
● DTC can also read any of these
binary formats to source format

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Device Tree: System Representation
/
/ Flattened Device Tree memory
Bank0
memory Bank0 cpu
CPU0
cpu CPU0
CPU1
CPU1 Ethernet soc
soc bus0
bus0 Adapters Ethernet
Adapters
bus1 GPU bus1
GPU
PCI Bus PCI Bus

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Device Tree: Tools
● DTC
○ Official Compiler
○ Maintained by David Gibson & Jon Loeliger
● PyFDT : https://github.com/superna9999/pyfdt
○ My Python implementation of Device Tree data structure
○ Loads Binary Blobs into native object model
○ Can produce Source, Blobs and experimental Json format
● Other ?
○ Zephyr has a custom Python based Source Interpreter
○ DT Schemas tools converts DTB into Yaml for validation

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Device Tree: Source Format
● Nodes
○ Groupings of properties and child nodes
● Properties
○ Key-Value Pairs
■ Text strings “my string”
■ Cells (32-bit) <0xdeadbeef 11 0xf00d>
■ Binary data [0x01 0x02 0x03 0x04]
■ mixed data, concatenate with a comma
● “my string”, <0xdeadbeef>, [0x04], “your string”
● Phandles
○ Reference to another node
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Device Tree: Source Format
/{
node1@0 {
each number (cell) is a uint32
a-cell-property = <1 2 3 4>;
a-string-list-property = "first string", "second string";
a-byte-data-property = [0x01 0x23 0x34 0x56];
child-node1@0 {
first-child-property; Phandle with
second-child-property = <1>; parameters
third-child-property = <&node2 12 235>;
a-string-property = "Hello, world";
};
node2: child-node2@1 {
};
};

};
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Device Tree: System Representation
#include
soc-family.dtsi

#include soc-variant.dtsi
board-family.dtsi

board.dts
#include

dtc -O dtb

board.dts

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Device Tree: System Representation
meson-gx.dtsi #include #include
meson-gxl.dtsi meson-gxl-mali.dtsi

#include
meson-gx-p23x-q20x.dtsi #include
meson-gxl-s905d.dtsi

meson-gxl-s905d-p230.dts #include

dtc -O dtb

meson-gxl-s905d-p230.dtb

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 Device Tree : Work Flow

Now, GCC
is used to
pre-process
the DTS
Source, to
include
shared C
headers

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 Device Tree: Present
● Linux
○ Supported in 15 architectures : arc, arm, arm64, c6x,
cris, h8300, metag, microblaze, mips, nios2, openrisc,
powerpc, riscv, sh, xtensa (+ 2 x86 boards)
○ Mandatory for new Hardware in (at least) ARM/ARM64
○ Adopted by riscv, DT was in ROM until early this year
○ ARM : 1176 board, ARM64 : 262, powerpc : 200
■ 1438 ARM board (partially) supported ! (v5.4-rc4)

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 Device Tree: Present
● Bindings (Device-tree schemas LWN.net article)
○ The device-tree bindings define how a particular piece of
hardware is described in a device tree.
○ Drivers then implement those bindings.
○ The device-tree documentation shows how to use the
bindings to describe systems: which properties are available and
which values they may have.
○ In theory, the bindings, drivers and documentation should be
consistent [...] In practice, they are often not consistent and, [...]
using those bindings correctly [...] is not a trivial task

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 Device Tree: Present
● Bindings as Device-tree schemas
○ Recently, Rob Herring proposed a move to a more structured
documentation format for device-tree bindings using JSON Schema to
allow automated validation.
○ Numerous proposals have been made in the past to address the
validation of device trees.
○ Instead of converting DT to YAML, let’s formalize the Bindings
■ Free-form text to YAML
■ JSON Schema for schema vocabulary
■ Permits validating Bindings and DT at build-time

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 Device Tree: Present
● Bindings as Device-tree schemas
$id: "http://devicetree.org/schemas/bindings/vendor/someexample.yaml#"
$schema: "http://devicetree.org/meta-schemas/core.yaml#"
title: Documentation example
maintainers:
- Our Maintainer <[email protected]>
description: |
Multi-line description is to be added here.
properties:
# Here we define the compatible property with one possible string
compatible:
items:
- const: vendor,my-clk
reg:
maxItems: 1
required:
- compatible

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Device Tree: Present
● BSD*
○ FreeBSD : support for ARM, AVR32, MIPS,
PowerPC based platforms
○ NetBSD: “Flat device tree” support was added in
version 8.0 for NetBSD/evbarm (aarch32 and
aarch64)
○ OpenBSD: supported by sync’ing Linux DTBs

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Device Tree: Present
● U-Boot
○ Used in main U-Boot with the Linux Device Trees along
the U-Boot “Driver Model”
○ Used as Boot Image in Flattened Image Tree format to
store multiple kernels and add security
○ Supports loading Overlays before starting the kernel
● U-Boot Device Tree support in SPL
○ SPL (Secondary Program Loader) is memory constraint
○ Nodes to be kept at tagged with “u-boot,dm-spl”

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Device Tree: Present
● EFI
○ Can pass a Device Tree for non-ACPI
ARM/ARM64/RISCV systems
● Trusted Firmware-A
○ Since 2013, first Foundation Model, now STM32MP1
● OPTEE
○ Since Nov 30, 2018 for STM32MP1 support

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Device Tree: Non-Linux
● Used Zephyr RTOS
○ The DeviceTree is not used at runtime, but used to
generate some compile time defines used by:
■ the build system (CMake)
■ the config system (Kconfig)
○ This gives more flexibility over C header files or Kconfig
config files
○ Can leverage the concept of Overlays
○ Shares the same memory constraint as U-Boot SPL

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Device Tree: Future

Where and how will it be used ?

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Device Tree: Future
● Linux Plumbers Devicetree track November 2018
○ https://elinux.org/Device_tree_future#Linux_Plumbers_2018
○ Json-schema for DT bindings and validation
○ DT memory (kernel), DT memory (bootloader), storage
(FDT) size
○ New FDT format & Overlays
○ FPGA and Devicetree

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Device Tree: Future
● Overlays (even if it was already been partially mainlined)
○ Overlays permits dynamically changing the Device
Tree on a running system
○ Is used a lot on Single Board Computers
○ Very handy to support HATs or Daughter Boards
○ Plumbing is already in the kernel for years
○ But still in discussion about how to handle
maintenance of these overlays fragments.

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Device Tree: Future
● Current Overlays as used out-of-tree (e.g. RPi)
○ You can specify which node you which to change
○ You can specify multiple changes : fragments
○ Syntax Example :
fragment@0 {
target = <&node0>;
Deprecated
__overlay__ {
syntax, subnode1: subnode {
my-attribute = “abcd”;
don’t use
};
anymore !
};
};
};

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Device Tree: Future
● Overlays
○ Not yet totally formalized
○ Official DTC compiler supports syntax since October 2018
○ Bootloader (U-Boot) can load overlays before loading Linux
○ A lot of issues to fix/solve for live Linux Overlay loading
■ Overlay validation
■ Metadata encoding
■ New format of overlay is in discussion

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Any questions ?

Thank you !

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