Linux, in the tradition of UNIX-like operating systems, implements file system permissions using a rather coarse scheme. While this is sufficient for a surprisingly large set of applications, it is too inflexible for many other scenarios. For that reason, all the major commercial UNIX operating systems have extended this simple scheme in one way or the other. This is an effort to implement POSIX-like Access Control Lists for Linux. Access Control Lists are built on top of Extended Attributes, which can also be used to associate other pieces of information with files such as Filesystem Capabilities, or user data like mime type and search keywords.
