Open firmware is already using the serial-number property for passing the device's serial number from the bootloader to the kernel. In addition, lshw already has support for scanning this property. The serial number is a string that somewhat represents the device's serial number. It might come from some form of storage (e.g. an eeprom) and be programmed at factory-time by the manufacturer or come from identification bits available in e.g. the SoC (note that the soc_id property in the SoC bus should hold a full account of those bits). The serial number is taken as-is from the bootloader, so it is up to the bootloader to define where the serial number comes from and what length it should be. Some use cases for the serial number require it to have a maximum length (e.g. for USB serial number) and some other cases imply more restrictions on what the serial number should look like (e.g. in Android, the ro.serialno property is usually a 16-bytes (plus one null byte) representation of a 64 bit number). Signed-off-by: Paul Kocialkowski <contact@xxxxxxxx> --- Documentation/devicetree/booting-without-of.txt | 4 ++++ 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+) diff --git a/Documentation/devicetree/booting-without-of.txt b/Documentation/devicetree/booting-without-of.txt index 7768518..95fc385 100644 --- a/Documentation/devicetree/booting-without-of.txt +++ b/Documentation/devicetree/booting-without-of.txt @@ -828,6 +828,10 @@ address which can extend beyond that limit. name may clash with standard defined ones, you prefix them with your vendor name and a comma. + Additional properties for the root node: + + - serial-number : a string representing the device's serial number + b) The /cpus node This node is the parent of all individual CPU nodes. It doesn't -- 1.9.1 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html