Understanding the basic concept of the device tree mechanism

The support of the device tree is enabled in the kernel by setting the CONFIG_OF option to Y. To pull the device tree API from your driver, you must add the following headers:

#include <linux/of.h>
#include <linux/of_device.h>

The device tree supports a few data types and writing conventions that we can summarize with a sample node description:

/* This is a comment */
// This is another comment
node_label: nodename@reg{
   string-property = "a string";
   string-list = "red fish", "blue fish";
   one-int-property = <197>; /* One cell in the property */
   int-list-property = <0xbeef 123 0xabcd4>;
   mixed-list-property = "a string", <35>,[0x01 0x23 0x45];
   byte-array-property = [0x01 0x23 0x45 0x67];
   boolean-property;
};

In the preceding...