Some of these functions fail to compile when not inlined, so we should
be explicit.
Before deciding on this approach I tried various ways of making all
these functions #[inline(never)] to save instructions but I ran into
blockers:
- These functions currently return Result, which is a structure. This is
not permitted in BPF.
- I tried inventing a newtype that is a #[repr(transparent)] wrapper of
u16, and having these functions return that; however it seems that
even if the object code is legal, the verifier will reject such
functions because the BTF (if present, and it was in my local
experiments) would indicate that the return is a structure.
- I tried having these functions return a plain u16 where 0 means error,
but the verifier still rejected the BTF because the receiver (even if
made into &self) is considered a structure, and forbidden.
We can eventually overcome these problems by "lying" in our BTF once
support for it matures in the bpf-linker repo (e.g. Option<NonZeroU16>
should be perfectly legal as it is guaranteed to be word-sized), but we
aren't there yet, and this is the safest thing we can do for now.