I went through many tutorials and understood that device tree binary and kernel booted from boot at same time. Why do we need both? Can the entire board run on a DTB alone?
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dtb is a list of devices for the system and their addresses. the kernel is the code itself. you could live without the dtb as in the old days, but you cannot run code if you have no code. – old_timer Jun 18 '21 at 13:13
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The device tree is a structure to describe the board. It is like 'bios' information on a PC. You always run the same version of Windows. It is the same with the Linux kernel. Linux can be built to run on many ARM devices. The device tree tells it the specifics of a sysem. For embedded type situations (custom hardware and software), there is often only one device tree and one kernel. See [device-tree wiki](https://stackoverflow.com/tags/device-tree/info)... apparently google has failed you. – artless noise Jun 22 '21 at 20:01
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Possibly related: [Why have a boot loader in an embedded device?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15548004/why-do-we-need-a-bootloader-in-an-embedded-device) I think you are confused by the term **binary**. A *device tree binary* is just a compressed form of the device tree data structure. It is not a 'binary', as in an executable; binary just means not human readable (Ascii, utf8, etc). – artless noise Jun 22 '21 at 20:07