I am new to Linux & Linux device drivers and have a feasibility question to hopefully avoid some work before I get started.

Our current (embedded Linux) system implements a custom USB driver to communicate with a certain real-time peripheral. We would like to be able to implement a driver that we could swap in without changing the application's code, except instead have the data be communicated over a TCP/IP ethernet network.

Coming from a straight-embedded world, at first I thought it would be easy if both drivers implemented the same interface, but one simply turned around and used ethernet instead of sending packets out the USB port. But now it appears that there are a lot of differences between how network and character devices are set up, as well as limitations to what you can do in the kernel that might prohibit me from pursuing our initial plan.

My question is this: How feasible is it to redirect data intended for a USB device inside a character device driver to another computer over the network?

Thanks for your input.

Andre