The device tree applies an ascii format to describe a hardware layout, which is then converted into a flattened binary representation by dtc (the "device tree compiler"). A bootloader supporting device trees loads the flattened device tree into memory as a binary blob, and passes the linux kernel a pointer to this blob. The kernel then uses a built-in device tree parser to interpret the hardware layout. The device tree code had been in some of platforms (powerpc, sparc, and microblaze) for a long period, it has been ported to ARM platform recently. Grant Likely (the device tree maintainer, glikely@xxxxxxxxxxxx) has put a lot of effort to eliminate the duplication in arch-specific code (like prior 2.6.33.1 kernel) so that it becomes easy to get the device tree working with a new platform. The patches are intended to support the device tree in MIPS. It is ported against the new test branch (git://git.secretlab.ca/git/linux-2.6 test-devicetree). Dezhong
