Device Tree Bindings — What They Are and Why They Matter

written: 15th March, 2026 Motivation: I was applying for GSoC 2026 - DT Bindings Project. In order to understand this project more, I decided to start off my learning about them first. I had also learnt about ACPI tables in this post while investigating my laptop's low power bug, and had encountered device trees. This made me curious about the GSoC project and so, I decided to learn about Device trees. Along the way, I started finding them really interesting and worked on a patch to convert a DT binding to a DT Schema too! (i will talk about that in the next post) What is a device tree? A device tree is a data structure that describes hardware. Hardware can be discoverable or non discoverable. Discoverable -- some buses like PCI(e) and USB are discoverable -- can enumerate and identify connected devices at runtime Non discoverable -- Buses like I2C, SPI, 1-Wire arent -- system must know how the devices are configured and what devices are connected --> this is where device trees are use