[coldtea]

They would still keep something like resource forks. Most modern filesystems have them. Here's the man page for Ext4 and co on them:

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man5/attr.5.html

[duskwuff]

Heck - at this point, resource forks are exposed as a "com.apple.ResourceFork" xattr with a large binary value. The primary remaining visible quirk is that they're also accessible via a magic path ("file/..namedFork/rsrc") -- the fact that the file system has a special way of storing them is irrelevent to userspace.

[yrro]

Ah, that explains why people in this thread are so confused between alternate forks/streams, and extended attributes!