atime is a legacy ass-backwards default That no one dared touching it so far does not make it less stupid We're making more user-impacting changes with less cause every release
Let's just disable atime asap so more testers check it before F8, and forget about it
Going through the LKML thread on http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148 I learnt that Ubuntu has already turned it off, and in principle both Alan Cox and Ingo Molnar want it to be that way for Fedora 8 too.
Happy hacking, Debarshi