Yeah that part of the article put a big smile on my face.
I did the same thing back in college, when I was in a lab. We wanted to do some research on Wi-Fi signals, and I happened to own a bunch of Wi-Fi adaptors produced by SomeSmallTech Co. Ltd., which featured relatively new Atheros chips and didn't have Linux drivers at the time.
So I sent an email to the company's public email address, asking for some datasheets, "for science". To my disappointment, presumably a PR person replied that they "don't have a company policy to collaborate with academic research". (But they did send a quick reply, kudos to that.)
Funnily enough, years later I ended up working for said company. Naturally, when I first logged into the company network, I searched for the datasheets I asked for. There were "classified" watermarks all over the PDFs :)
Built on top of Owl Lisp[1]. TIL about this dialect, and it looks interesting! Instead of native threads, it has continuation-based threads[2], and it seems the whole VM architecture is based on that.
I think the architecture assumes all loaded kernels are trusted, and imposes no isolation other than having them running on different CPUs.
Given the (relative) simplicity of the PoC, it could be really performant.