Wow, this is interesting. The idea of boot from USB and USB gadgets? That has been expanded to create a Raspberry Pi Zero that can be used as a USB attached GPIO expander for the Raspberry Pi Debian x86 PC distribution. How do they do this? With power of udev… ugh, that sounds like a very ephemeral and brittle solution that is going to break at the earliest moment that a incompatible change allows it to. Yeah, it’s an interesting demo short-term, and useful at that in so far as the price points of Raspberry Pi Zero (and the amount of money saved) are so low.
Also, note that the Raspberry Pi Zero uses BCM2708, not BCM2835. Only the Raspberry Pi Compute Modules have the newer BCM chip revisions in them.
20191120/https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/gpio-expander/
20191120/https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/computemodule/cm-emmc-flashing.md
Also, I found this otther interesting article announcing the expansion of Raspberry Pi Zero W distributors. Gosh, I thought the Raspberry Pi Zero was hard to come by inside the United States, but I’ve been told, outside the United States, it is heck to get hold of a Raspberry Pi Zero W!
20191120/https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-zero-distributors-annoucement/