ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 5 -- United States Patent no. 12,277,422, issued on April 15, was assigned to VMware LLC (Palo Alto, Calif.).
"Device tree runtime mechanism" was invented by Andrei Warkentin (South Elgin, Ill.), Regis Duchesne (Vaud, Switzerland) and Renukanthan Raman (Los Altos, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Systems and methods are included for causing a computing device to boot by retrieving hardware information from a device tree and further properties by utilizing a native access method call identified in the device tree. The access method can allow for getting a property, getting a property length, or setting a property. A table within firmware can identify the method, whic...