there is this particular version of dtc by Pantelis Antoniou https://github.com/pantoniou/dtc which allows dynamic overlays and use of symbols instead of numeric addresses as references https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/dynamic-dt-elce14.pdf   after doing a bit of research i found that the more recent version of device-tree-compiler shipped with the kernel and armbian has built-in the dynamic overlays as well https://git.kernel.org/pub/s