Might be related, but extended attribute calls will fail on sysfs:
[root@hypervisor eth0]# lsattr address
lsattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device While reading flags on address
[root@hypervisor eth0]#
Looking at my strace it looks like rsync tries to pull in extended attributes by default:
22964 <... getxattr resumed> , 0x7fff42845110, 132) = -1 ENODATA (No data available)
I tried finding a flag to give rsync to see if skipping extended attributes resolves the issue but wasn't able to find anything (--xattrs turns them on at the destination).