This is why I am always skeptical when anyone writes that they are the first to do something… the added caveat is always, “that we know of”

"Who did it first" is not interesting to me, but what they're doing isn't a "loophole"; that's all I'm concerned with.

It's a weird choice of word (especially in the company name, honestly). To my mind, loopholes are things that get closed. I would not want to be relying on a loophole for anything.

"Whoops, sorry, an innocent kernel update broke your entire production!"

The framing of the article --- the article is fine, it's a good piece --- is weird to me because one of the original marquee use cases for XDP was for hosting providers, where virtuals are connected to physicals by way of tap interfaces, where you have to reason about the rx/tx path to do XDP at all. It's not that the article is bad, it just creates the impression that there's something weird or nonnormative about what they did, when, again, I think there's literally an xdp-tutorial example of this.

"Go ahead and do stuff like this and don't worry about whether it's a 'loophole' is I guess my whole point".

I am guessing the `loophole` wording is just referencing their company name.

in engineering there's also the "first unclassified attempt" stuff too

Similar fun as the time I discovered one could use IFB to set qdiscs on incoming traffic (why would one would do that is left as exercise to the reader, but my journey included using the 'plug' qdisc and tcp-checkpoint/restore). The Linux kernel has so many building blocks....