David Sterba <dave <at> jikos.cz> writes:

That's right. Inode represented as btrfs_inode_item does not contain any
xattr fields, they're stored independently as a btrfs_dir_item of type
BTRFS_FT_XATTR . Due to the way the b-tree keys are built, the xattr
item key should be stored near the inode item key, that's for the tree
search side. The xattr data are always stored inline in the b-tree leaf.

Thank you David and Hugo,

My bad on three counts:
1) My courtesy close seems to have gone missing.
 Sorry and thank you for replying.
2) I, perhaps, should have pointed to
https://wiki.debian.org/SELinux/Setup#Prerequisites
_.28kernel_and_filesystems.29
which gives a better explanation.
3) Made it clear that I wasn't attacking
 XFS, It's my fs of (non /boot) choice
for some years now; I'm exploring SELinux
 (after the recent Linux conf au 2012
talk) and know I have used inode size defaults
 for my xfs init back in the day!

Best

Al.