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You're reading from  Embedded Linux Projects Using Yocto Project Cookbook

Product typeBook
Published inMar 2015
Publisher
ISBN-139781784395186
Edition1st Edition
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Alex Gonzalez
Alex Gonzalez
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Alex Gonzalez

Alex González is a software engineering supervisor at Digi International and product owner of the Digi Embedded Yocto distribution. He started working professionally with embedded systems in 1999 and the Linux kernel in 2004, designing products for voice and video over IP networks, and followed his interests into machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies and the Internet of Things. Born and raised in Bilbao, Spain, Alex has an electronic engineering degree from the University of the Basque Country and he received his MSc in communication systems from the University of Portsmouth.
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Managing the device tree


The device tree is a data structure that is passed to the Linux kernel to describe the physical devices in a system.

In this recipe, we will explain how to work with device trees.

Getting ready

Devices that cannot be discovered by the CPU are handled by the platform devices API on the Linux kernel. The device tree replaces the legacy platform data where hardware characteristics were hardcoded in the kernel source so that platform devices can be instantiated. Before device trees came into use, the bootloader (for example, U-Boot) had to tell the kernel what machine type it was booting. Moreover, it had to pass other information such as memory size and location, kernel command line, and more.

The device tree should not be confused with the Linux kernel configuration. The device tree specifies what devices are available and how they are accessed, not whether the hardware is used.

The device tree was first used by the PowerPC architecture and was adopted later on by ARM and...

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Embedded Linux Projects Using Yocto Project Cookbook
Published in: Mar 2015Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781784395186

Author (1)

author image
Alex Gonzalez

Alex González is a software engineering supervisor at Digi International and product owner of the Digi Embedded Yocto distribution. He started working professionally with embedded systems in 1999 and the Linux kernel in 2004, designing products for voice and video over IP networks, and followed his interests into machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies and the Internet of Things. Born and raised in Bilbao, Spain, Alex has an electronic engineering degree from the University of the Basque Country and he received his MSc in communication systems from the University of Portsmouth.
Read more about Alex Gonzalez