Zephyr Meetup Germany: Karlsruhe

Devicetrees in Zephyr – Navigating Hardware Diversity

The bootup process of an embedded operating system typically begins with an evaluation of the surrounding hardware platform and the initialization of all required drivers. While many real time operating systems use hard-coded approaches, which are difficult to port from one hardware platform to another, Zephyr builds upon the concept of device trees. Known from the Linux kernel, device trees decouple the operating system from the underlying hardware platform by offering a machine readable platform description. This facilitates portability between platforms and architectures, which is an ever-growing demand also for embedded real time kernels such as Zephyr.

This talk gives an overview of the device tree concept, its implementation in Zephyr, and how it is used in the context of a Zephyr showcase implemented at inovex.