Fastest way to change running dtb

Tollef posted about using BeagleBone Black for temperature monitoring. There was a passage about patching the DTB (device tree) file:

... This needs to be compiled into a .dtb. I found the easiest way was just to drop the patched .dts into an unpacked kernel tree and then running make dtbs.

There are easier ways. For example, you can get the current device tree file generated from /proc:

apt-get install device-tree-compiler
dtc -I fs -O dts -o current.dts /proc/device-tree/

(Why /proc and not /sys ? because device tree predates /sys) Now you can just modify and build the dtb again, and install it back to where bootloader reads the dtb from:

vim current.dts
dtc -I dts -O dtb -o new.dtb current.dts

Alternative, of course, is to build a brand new mainline kernel and use the dynamic Device tree code now available.