Linux kernel 6.7 has been released, including support for the new next-gen copy-on-write (COW) bcachefs file system. The Register reports: Linus Torvalds announced the release on Sunday, noting that it is “one of the largest kernel releases we’ve ever had.”
Extended attributes just means that it supports storing extra information for each file. Those are used for (IIRC) ACLs, SELinux labelling and similar use cases that filesystems do not support explicitly. Basically it is a way to decouple the filesystem implementations from the details of those higher level use cases so those can change things up without changing every single filesystem implementation.