In embedded systems, many peripherals are connected to the main processor with busses like I2C, SPI, and UART, which do not support enumeration. Therefore, when an embedded system uses an operating system, such as Linux, it is necessary to convey the hardware configuration of the system, i.e. all the information about the connected peripherals, to the OS in a standard form. The most common way to do this in Linux is to use a device tree.
