This isn't the first time this idea has popped up. There are plenty of microcontrollers with USB device support so why not run a 9p server on the micro and let it serve it's hardware to a 9 machine directly, alleviating the user from ever thinking about a driver - the hardware is the driver. You could even embed a manual page that's just a file pulled from flash.
Here an idea: Since Wi-Fi chips are a pain I figure why not use an ESP32 to act as a software Wi-Fi dongle that serves itself as an ether(3) device doing all the work in the ESP while 9p runs over USB. Instant driverless Wi-Fi. You could even use them as an access point so there's lots of potential. Limited to 150Mbps but I believe this is faster than what we currently have with supported Wi-Fi chips, at least on 9front. Another thought are USB microcontrollers with various peripherals which could serve anything attached, uart(3), ether(3), spi bus, CAN, etc. Turn off the shelf micros into driverless dongles or weird docking stations. True distributed computing where even the hardware devices are little servers. On Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 5:16 PM David Boddie <da...@boddie.org.uk> wrote: > In Plan 9 adjacent territory, this talk came to my attention recently but > the video recording didn't appear until today, I think: > > https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6103-usb9pfs-network-booting-without-the-network/ > > Doing 9p over USB is interesting, though I would have considered using an > existing device class instead of doing something 9p-specific. > > It reminded me a bit of u-root. > > David > ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T18ad2d35a1754e48-M30dbc92bc6eb4c6675d4b64a Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
