The Device Tree is a data structure for describing hardware. Rather than hard coding every detail of a device into an operating system, many aspect of the hardware can be described in a data structure that is passed to the operating system at boot time. The device tree is used both by Open Firmware, and in the standalone Flattened Device Tree (FDT) form.
The data structure itself is a simple tree of named nodes and properties. Nodes contain properties and child nodes. Properties are simple name-value pairs. The structure can hold any kind of data.