The long-standing behavior of the `exclude` CompileCommand is to also apply to inlined versions of a method. On the other hand, the `compileonly` CompileCommand only affects top-level compilations of a method and not its inlining behavior.

The rational behind this decision is that `exclude` is intended to be used in production to workaround compiler crashes or bad compilations for certain methods and in these scenarios it usually doesn't matter if a "bad" method is getting compiled on the top level or if it gets inlined into another compilation unit.

The "inconsistent inlining behavior with CompileOnly" thread on hotspot-compiler-dev discusses this behavior (see [1]). The answer [2] specifically describes this long-standing behavior.

I think it would be good to document this behavior in the output of `-XX_CompileCommand=help`

[1] https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-compiler-dev/2016-June/thread.html#23575
[2] https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-compiler-dev/2016-June/023583.html