zfs set xattr=sa

[doohder]

I'm trying to configure a zfs dataset to set xattr=sa. However, the value doesn't change from xattr=on.

[doohder@rocky ~]$ sudo zfs set xattr=sa storage/config
[sudo] password for doohder:
[doohder@rocky ~]$ sudo zfs get xattr storage/config
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
storage/config xattr on local

I can set the value to "off" and it shows it as "off" however when I set it to "sa" it shows it as "on"

I'd like to set this as I have a podman container that is mounting in this directory that has thousands of tiny files. It takes 15 minutes to start because of selinux. I've read that changing this value to sa can help performance. I've confirmed by disabling selinux the container starts instantly. Everything I've read says you should be able to set it to "sa".

[doohder@rocky ~]$ zfs version
zfs-2.3.0-1
zfs-kmod-2.3.0-1

[doohder@rocky ~]$ uname -r
5.14.0-503.22.1.el9_5.x86_64

Distro: Rocky Linux 9.5

Any ideas on why this doesn't appear to change ? I've even tried creating a new dataset with it xattr=sa.

[gmelikov]

Since version 2.3.0 xattr=on is equal to xattr=sa, so it's already actually on https://github.com/gmelikov/zfs/blob/master/man/man7/zfsprops.7#L2004-L2007 .

Unfortunately it's not so obvious, see #15147 (comment) discussion. @behlendorf fyi, maybe someone has good thoughts how to add something to xattr_table to make it more straightforward as with compression=on=lz4 without feature flags, or describe it in releases.