Six Practical Ways to Debug Device Tree and Device Registration in Linux Drivers

6. Accessing device‑tree properties from kernel code

The kernel provides a set of helper functions in include/linux/of.h to query nodes and read properties. Typical usage patterns include:

#include <linux/of.h>
struct device_node *np;
const char *status;

np = of_find_node_by_path("/soc/driver-test");
if (!np) return -ENODEV;

/* Read a string property */
of_property_read_string(np, "status", &status);

/* Read a 32‑bit integer */
u32 clk_phandle;
of_property_read_u32(np, "clocks", &clk_phandle);

/* Check if the node is enabled */
if (of_device_is_available(np)) {
    /* probe the driver */
}

These APIs are essential for drivers that need to adapt to different hardware configurations described by the device tree.