Whenever an emerge is using paxctl (e.g. firefox, thunderbird, libreoffice, all kinds of java, ...), it displays a big warning that paxctl failed to set the required pax flags. However, in spite of the warning, the executables do have the correct pax flags set and work fine, so paxctl actually worked (paxctl also works without warning when called manually). Most likely (as the warning says something about XATTR), the warning is displayed because setting newstyle pax flags failed (which is expected, because neither my kernel nor my filesystems support xattr). However, there should be no warning as long as oldstyle pax flags work fine.
Warning has disappeared, obviously something was fixed...