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by anthk 108 days ago
ARM device trees suck. ACPI for sure it's hell, but a DTB per device it's a damn disaster. U-Boot it's open, but it sucks at having to plug a damn USB-serial cable in 2026 in order to get a prompt. That should come builtin, and with an easy builting help or some text based menu.
1 comments

It's either a DTB per device or a firmware blob per device. I'll take the open source device tree anytime!
A DTB is a blob. Whether you have the source is a vendor decision, just like ACPI. There's no inherent difference here.
You can convert a DTB blob back into source code:

dtc -I dtb -O dts -o devicetree.dts blob.dtb

Big, biiig, biiiiig difference!

PS: You can also examine it directly as a directory tree in /sys/firmware/devicetree/*

You can convert ACPI bytecode back to source with iasl. No difference at all.
Then you can load them in u-boot and there's no need for any ohter blob.
Yes, and you can do this with ACPI as well. There's no difference between the inherent freedom of ACPI and Devicetree.