A new long-form blog article has been posted on my official blog.

Abstract

Device trees are used to communicate existence of non-discoverable hardware, such as where scratchpad memory appears in the processor’s address space, to an operating system. Newer platforms, such as RISC-V, offer the opportunity to design systems in a way that obviates the need for complexities such as device trees; yet, these opportunities are often not exploited. The Kestrel-3 is designed to minimize its need for any kind of device tree-like concept through, in part, common sense rules concerning address decoding and sensible system software. This allows the system firmware and/or operating system to discover the hardware’s boot-up RAM address decode window with an algorithm substantially simpler than a typical device tree parser.