On Tuesday 31 January 2012, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:

I have an idea: we can make the generic one inline
if we keep it in the .c file. So something like
the below on top of my patch will probably work.
Ack?

IMHO this is still worse than the macro, because it breaks common practice.
The common way to do this is #ifdef/#else/#endif in the header file to
provide either an extern or a macro/inline definition, while having the
inline definition in a separate place makes it harder to understand
what's going on. E.g. a frequent review comment is to not put extern
declarations inside of #ifdef, but if someone tries that here, it would
break.

You also still need the #ifdef in the implementation file, which we
try to avoid normally just like we try to avoid macros where possible.

	Arnd