BPF programs have gained significantly in capabilities over the last few years and can now perform many useful operations. That said, BPF developers have had to work around an annoying limitation until recently: they could not use loops. This restriction was recently lifted by a patch set from Alexei Starovoitov that was merged for Linux 5.3. In addition to adding support for loops, it also greatly decreases the load time of most BPF programs.