how to enable xattr support in Debian 9 (Stretch)

Question

I have added user_xattr in ext4 but when I remount it doesn't show xattr & I installed attr & attr_dev

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
/dev/mapper/Anonymous--vg-root /               ext4\040remount,user_xattr    errors=remount-ro 0       1`

Solution

User extended attributes are supported by default on Ext4, you don’t need to do anything to enable them. To verify this, run

cd
touch xattr-test
setfattr -n user.test -v "hello" xattr-test
getfattr xattr-test

This should show that the extended attribute was successfully stored.

Comments

[Toni Homedes i Saun]

Not working here, bare debian 9.5 server install, no desktop. setfattr was not even there. Installed attr. attr_dev unknown by apt. setfattr: test: Operation not supported

[Toni Homedes i Saun]

Found it's attr-dev, not attr_dev, but after installing it it keeps not working. Try as root: truncate -s 100M /tmp/test-bd; mkfs.ext4 /tmp/test-bd; mount -o user_xattr /tmp/test-bd /mnt; touch /mnt/test-file; setfattr -n hola -v lola /mnt/test-file; umount /mnt; rm /tmp/test-bd

[Stephen Kitt]

@Toni you need to specify the namespace to use, user in this case: setfattr -n user.hola -v lola /mnt/test-file. See man 5 attr for details.