about "ea support" parameter

[Leo Fan]

Hi samba experts,

I need your help to understand the smb.conf parameter ‘ea support’.
We are developing a customized samba service to serve Windows 10 clients and MAC OS clients. And, we would like to set ‘EA support = no’ to gain more performance of ‘dir’ command especially on the large directory, but as smb.conf doc says, EA support disablement will impact Windows file service compatibility.

    The default has changed to yes in Samba release 4.9.0 and above to allow better Windows
    fileserver compatibility in a default install.

I am not quite clear about compatibility problem with EA support disablement, and have some questions:


  1.  In which scenarios will there be windows file service compatibility?
  2.  How do we create and use EA?
  3.  Does any well-known Windows/MAC application use EA?

I will appreciate it if you will help me out.

Thanks,
Leo Fan