v9fb: A remote framebuffer infrastructure for Linux

v9fb is a software infrastructure that allows extending framebuffer devices in Linux over the network by providing an abstraction to them in the form of a filesystem hierarchy. Framebuffer based graphic devices export a synthetic filesystem which offers a simple and easy-to-use interface for performing common framebuffer operations. Remote framebuffer devices could be accessed over the network using the 9P protocol support in Linux. We describe the infrastructure in detail and review some of the benefits it offers similar to Plan 9 distributed systems. We discuss the applications of this infrastructure to remotely display and run interactive applications on a terminal while offloading the computation to remote servers, and more importantly the flexibility it offers in driving tiled-display walls by aggregating graphic devices in the network.