Dê uma olhada na seção Atributos Estendidos deste artigo, intitulada: Listas de controle de acesso POSIX no Linux .
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ACLs are pieces of information of variable length that are associated
with file system objects. Dedicated strategies for storing ACLs on
file systems might be devised, as Solaris does on the UFS file system
[13]. Each inode on a UFS file system has a field called i_shadow. If
an inode has an ACL, this field points to a shadow inode. On the file
system, shadow inodes are used like regular files. Each shadow inode
stores an ACL in its data blocks. Multiple files with the same ACL may
point to the same shadow inode.
Because other kernel and user space extensions in addition to ACLs
benefit from being able to associate pieces of information with files,
Linux and most other UNIX-like operating systems implement a more
general mechanism called Extended Attributes (EAs). On these systems,
ACLs are implemented as EAs.
Após a seção Atributos estendidos , ele fica dentro dos detalhes de como os vários sistemas de arquivos, ext2 / ext3, JFS, etc. implementam o EA.