This kind of stuff is stupid easy on an OS like Plan 9 where you speak a single protocol: 9P. Ethernet devices are abstracted and served by the kernel as a file system explained in ether(3). Since it's all 9P the system doesn't care where the server is running; could be a local in-kernel/user-space server or remote server over ANY 2-way link including TCP, IL, PCIe link, RS232 port, SPI, USB, etc. This means you can mount individual pieces of hardware or networking stacks like ip(3), any 9P server, from other machines to a processes local namespace. Per-process name spaces let you customize the processes view of the file system and hence all its children allowing you to customize each and every programs resource view.

There is interest in getting 9front running on the Octeon chips. This would allow one to run anything they want on an Octeon card (Plan 9 cross platform is first class) so one could boot the card using the hosts root file system, write and test a program on the host, change the objtype env variable to mips/arm, build the binary for the Octeon and then run it on the Octeon using rcpu (like running a command remotely via ssh.) All you need is a working kernel on the Octeon and a host kernel driver and the rest is out of the box.