Hi Colin,
Another thought that came to me is whether Sculpt VMs can do USB passthrough, and then I could run a Linux VM which will have the drivers. Is that possible? Could the network connection make it's way out of the VM?
You can use USB passthrough on Sculpt, most prominently it is used for writing new Sculpt images to USB sticks [1]. It should also work for other USB devices like NICs and wireless dongles. However, there is no way for a VM to provide this as a service to the outside.
[1] https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-19-07#Updating_the_USB_boot...
Regards Josef