This is software which basically replicates what Plan9 gives you out of the box.

Dammit I really wish Plan9 had taken off. It isn’t perfect but it does a much, much better job of helping me run my applications in ways that I want.

If anyone doesn’t already know, one method of Plan9 remote access is to “cpu” into a remote machine which has the hardware you need. Your local filesystems go with you, and your environment on the remote machine consists of your local filesystems mounted to the remote machine, but only for you, and all applications you run in this context execute on the cpu of the remote machine and have access to the remote machines hardware, but your local filesystems. Imagine SSHing into a remote machine and your entire environment goes with you, development tools and all. That’s what Plan9 does for you.

So if I “cpu” into a machine without ffmpeg, but with a GPU and I run ffmpeg, not only will it work, but I can tell ffmpeg to use a hardware encoder with a simple command line flag, and it’ll work.

The great thing about Plan 9 is it can make other distributed systems look so complicated. The worst thing about Plan 9 is that it can make other distributed systems look so complicated!