If the verifier can prove to itself that a loop is bounded, it'll accept it. A good starting place for eBPF itself: if a normal ARM program could do it, eBPF can do it. It's a fully functional ISA.
It depends on what you're using it for. If you want to expose this to untrusted code, yes, but I wouldn't be comfortable doing that with DTrace either.
There's two untrusted code cases here: untrusted DTrace scripts / users, and untrusted targets for inspection. The latter has to be possible to examine, so the observability tools (like DTrace) have to be secure for that purpose. This means you want to make it difficult to overflow buffers in the observability tools.
There's also a need to make sure that even trusted users don't accidentally cause too much observability load. That's why DTrace has a circular probe buffer pool, it's why it drops probes under load, it's why it pre-allocates each probe's buffer by computing how much the probe's actions will write to it, it's why it doesn't allow looping (since that would make the probe's effect less predictable), etc.
Bryan, Adam, and Mike designed it this way two plus decades ago, and Linux still hasn't caught up.
Linux has a different design than DTrace; eBPF is more capable as a trusted tool, and less capable for untrusted tools. It doesn't make sense to say one approach has "caught up" to the other, unless you really believe the verifier will reach a state where nobody's going find verifier bugs --- at which point eBPF will be strictly superior. Beyond that, it's a matter of taste. What seems clearly to be true is that eBPF is wildly more popular.
It's really hard to bring a host to its knees using DTrace, yet it's quite powerful for observability. In my opinion it is better to start with that then add extra power where it's needed.
I understand the argument, but it's clear which one succeeded in the market. Meanwhile: we take pretty good advantage of the extra power eBPF gives us over what DTrace would, so I'm happy to be on the golden path for the platform here. Like I said, though: this is a matter of taste.
